Anomalous viscosity of an expanding quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

We argue that an expanding quark-gluon plasma has an anomalous viscosity, which arises from interactions with dynamically generated colour fields. The anomalous viscosity dominates over the collisional viscosity for large velocity gradients or weak coupling. This effect may provide an explanation for the apparent near perfect liquidity of the matter produced in nuclear collisions at RHIC without the assumption that it is a strongly coupled state.

Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure, to appear in the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions: Quark Matter 2006 (QM 2006), Shanghai, China, 14-20 Nov 2006