Bulk viscosity, chemical equilibration and flow at RHIC

Abstract

We study the effects of bulk viscosity on p_T spectra and elliptic flow in heavy ion collisions at RHIC. We argue that direct effect of the bulk viscosity on the evolution of the velocity field is small, but corrections to the freezeout distributions can be significant. These effects are dominated by chemical non-equilibration in the hadronic phase. We show that a non-zero bulk viscosity in the range $\zeta /s\text{lsim}0.05$ improves the description of spectra and flow at RHIC.

Comments: 4 pages,to appear in the proceedings of Quark Matter 2012, August 13-18, Washington D.C., USA