We study the temperature-dependence of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in pure Yang-Mills theory and in QCD with light and strange quarks within kinetic theory in the relaxation time approximation. As effective degrees of freedom in a deconfined phase we consider quasiparticle excitations with quark and gluon quantum numbers and dispersion relations that depend explicitly on the temperature. The quasiparticle relaxation times are obtained by computing the microscopic two-body scattering amplitudes for the elementary scatterings among the quasiparticles. For pure Yang-Mills theory we show that the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio exhibits a characteristic non-monotonicity with a minimum at the first-order phase transition. In the presence of dynamical quarks the ratio smoothens while still exhibiting a minimum near confinement. Furthermore, there is a significant increase of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in QCD resulting from the quark contributions. This observation differs from previously reported estimates based on functional methods but is in line with perturbative QCD expectations at higher temperatures.
We have investigated shear viscosity of quark matter in presence of a strong uniform magnetic field background where Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model has been considered to describe the magneto-thermodynamical properties of the medium. In presence of magnetic field, shear viscosity coefficient gets split into different components because of anisotropy in tangential stress of the fluid. Four different components can be merged to two components in limit of strong field, where collisional width of quark becomes much lower than its synchrotron frequency. A simplified contact diagram of quark-quark interaction can estimate a small collisional width, where strong field limit expressions are exactly applicable. Although, for RHIC or LHC matter, one can expect a large thermal width, for which generalized four components viscosities are necessary. We have explored these all different possible cases in the thermodynamical framework of Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model.
The quark susceptibility $chi_q$ at zero and finite quark chemical potential provides a critical benchmark to determine the quark-gluon-plasma (QGP) degrees of freedom in relation to the results from lattice QCD (lQCD) in addition to the equation of state and transport coefficients. Here we extend the familiar dynamical-quasiparticle model (DQPM) to partonic propagators that explicitly depend on the three-momentum with respect to the partonic medium at rest in order to match perturbative QCD (pQCD) at high momenta. Within the extended dynamical-quasi-particle model (DQPM$^*$) we reproduce simultaneously the lQCD results for the quark number density and susceptibility and the QGP pressure at zero and finite (but small) chemical potential $mu_q$. The shear viscosity $eta$ and the electric conductivity $sigma_e$ from the extended quasiparticle model (DQPM$^*$) also turn out in close agreement with lattice results for $mu_q$ =0. The DQPM$^*$, furthermore, allows to evaluate the momentum $p$, temperature $T$ and chemical potential $mu_q$ dependencies of the partonic degrees of freedom also for larger $mu_q$ which are mandatory for transport studies of heavy-ion collisions in the regime 5 GeV $< sqrt{s_{NN}} <$ 10 GeV.
We give the alternative formulation of quasiparticle model of quark gluon plasma with medium dependent dispersion relation. The model is thermodynamically consistent provided the medium dependent contribution to the energy density is taken in to account. We establish the connection of our model with other variants of quasiparticle models which are thermodynamically consistent. We test the model by comparing the equation of state with the lattice gauge theory simulations of SU(3) pure gluodynamics .
We compute the shear viscosity of QCD with matter, including almost all next-to-leading order corrections -- that is, corrections suppressed by one power of $g$ relative to leading order. We argue that the still missing terms are small. The next-to-leading order corrections are large and bring $eta/s$ down by more than a factor of 3 at physically relevant couplings. The perturbative expansion is problematic even at $T simeq 100$ GeV. The largest next-to-leading order correction to $eta/s$ arises from modifications to the qhat parameter, which determines the rate of transverse momentum diffusion. We also explore quark number diffusion, and shear viscosity in pure-glue QCD and in QED.
The fireball concept of Rolf Hagedorn, developed in the 1960s, is an alternative description of hadronic matter. Using a recently derived mass spectrum, we use the transport model GiBUU to calculate the shear viscosity of a gas of such Hagedorn states, applying the Green-Kubo method to Monte-Carlo calculations. Since the entropy density is rising ad infinitum near $T_H$, this leads to a very low shear viscosity to entropy density ratio near $T_H$. Further, by comparing our results with analytic expressions, we find a nice extrapolation behavior, indicating that a gas of Hagedorn states comes close or even below the boundary $1/4pi$ from AdS-CFT.