Transport properties of anisotropically expanding quark-gluon plasma within a quasi-particle model

Abstract

The bulk and shear viscosities ($\eta$ and $\zeta$) have been studied for quark-gluon-plasma produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions within semi-classical transport theory, in a recently proposed quasi-particle model of (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD equation of state. These transport parameters have been found to be highly sensitive to the interactions present in hot QCD. Contributions to the transport coefficients from both the gluonic sector and the matter sector have been investigated. The matter sector is found to be significantly dominating over the gluonic sector, in both the cases of $\eta$ and $\zeta$. The temperature dependences of the quantities, $\zeta /\mathcal{S}$, and $\zeta /\eta$ indicate a sharply rising trend for the $\zeta$, closer to the QCD transition temperature. Both $\eta$, and $\zeta$ are shown to be equally significant for the temperatures that are accessible in the relativistic heavy ion collision experiments, and hence play crucial role while investigating the properties of the quark-gluon plasma.

Comments: 14 pages, 6 figures, two column, revtex4-1, v3: version accepted for publication in Physical Review D