Shear viscosity of a massless quark-gluon gas in chemical equilibrium in terms of all $2\leftrightarrow 2$ cross sections

Abstract

The analytical expressions of the shear viscosity of both one and two particle species with Boltzmann statistics and $2\to 2$ elastic scatterings are known from the Chapman-Enskog method and have been shown to be quite accurate. The expression for a multi-species hadronic gas under $2\to 2$ elastic scatterings is also known. Here we use the Chapman-Enskog method to derive the explicit expression of shear viscosity of a massless quark-gluon gas of $N_f$ quark flavors in chemical equilibrium subjected to all $2\to 2$ parton scatterings including for the first time inelastic scatterings. We then verify the expression in a general single-species limit, where the shear viscosity of the quark-gluon gas should reduce to the result for a single particle species. In addition, we show the explicit analytical result in terms of the seven independent cross sections for the special case of isotropic and energy-independent cross sections. The analytical expressions derived here can be useful for determining the shear viscosity of parton transport models with any $2\to 2$ scattering cross sections. They can also be coupled with finite temperature QCD cross sections to help study the shear viscosity of the quark gluon plasma.

Comments: 19 pages, no figures; added a Discussions section and a new Appendix with minor change of title to match the journal version