Bulk Viscosity of Interacting Hadrons

Abstract

We show that first approximations to the bulk viscosity ${\eta }_v$ are expressible in terms of factors that depend on the sound speed $v_s$, the enthalpy, and the interaction (elastic and inelastic) cross section. The explicit dependence of ${\eta }_v$ on the factor $(\frac{1}{3}-v_s^2)$ is demonstrated in the Chapman-Enskog approximation as well as the variational and relaxation time approaches. The interesting feature of bulk viscosity is that the dominant contributions at a given temperature arise from particles which are neither extremely nonrelativistic nor extremely relativistic. Numerical results for a model binary mixture are reported.

Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure, Contribution to Quark Matter 2009, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA