200 A GeV Au+Au Collisions Serve a Nearly Perfect Quark-Gluon Liquid

Journal Article · Fri May 13 00:00:00 EDT 2011 · Physical Review Letters

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVLETT.106.192301· OSTI ID:21538326

Huichao, Song ^[1]; Bass, Steffen A ^[2]; Heinz, Ulrich; Shen, Chun ^[3]; Hirano, Tetsufumi ^[4]

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1. Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720 (United States)
2. Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708 (United States)
3. Department of Physics, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 (United States)
4. Department of Physics, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033 (Japan)

A new robust method to extract the specific shear viscosity ({eta}/s){sub QGP} of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) at temperatures T{sub c}<T < or approx. 2T{sub c} from the centrality dependence of the eccentricity-scaled elliptic flow v{sub 2}/{epsilon} measured in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions is presented. Coupling viscous fluid dynamics for the QGP with a microscopic transport model for hadronic freeze-out we find for 200 A GeV Au+Au collisions that v{sub 2}/{epsilon} is a universal function of multiplicity density (1/S)(dN{sub ch}/dy) that depends only on the viscosity but not on the model used for computing the initial fireball eccentricity {epsilon}. Comparing with measurements we find 1<4{pi}({eta}/s){sub QGP}<2.5 where the uncertainty range is dominated by model uncertainties for the values of {epsilon} used to normalize the measured v{sub 2}.

• OSTI ID: 21538326
• Journal Information: Physical Review Letters, Vol. 106, Issue 19; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.192301; (c) 2011 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 0031-9007
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
COLLISIONS
COUPLING
DENSITY
FLUID MECHANICS
FREEZING OUT
GEV RANGE 100-1000
GLUONS
GOLD
HADRONS
HEAVY ION REACTIONS
LIQUIDS
MULTIPLICITY
QUARK MATTER
QUARKS
RELATIVISTIC RANGE
SHEAR
TRANSPORT THEORY
VISCOSITY
BOSONS
ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
ELEMENTS
ENERGY RANGE
FERMIONS
FLUIDS
GEV RANGE
MATTER
MECHANICS
METALS
NUCLEAR REACTIONS
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES
SEPARATION PROCESSES
TRANSITION ELEMENTS