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Title: Small shear viscosity in the semiquark gluon plasma

Journal Article · · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields
 [1];  [2]
  1. Department of Physics, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502 (Japan)
  2. Department of Physics, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973 (United States)

At nonzero temperature in QCD, about the deconfining phase transition there is a semiquark gluon plasma (semi-QGP), where the expectation value of the (renormalized) Polyakov loop is less than one. This can be modeled by a semiclassical expansion about a constant field for the vector potential, A{sub 0}, which is diagonal in color. We compute the shear viscosity in the semi-QGP by using the Boltzmann equation in the presence of this background field. To leading, logarithmic order in weak coupling, the dominant diagrams are given by the usual scattering processes of 2{yields}2 particles. For simplicity we also assume that both the number of colors and flavors are large. Near the critical temperature T{sub c}, where the expectation value of the Polyakov loop is small, the overall density of colored fields decreases according to their color representation, with the density of quarks vanishes linearly with the loop, and that of gluons, quadratically. This decrease in the overall density dominates changes in the transport cross section. As a result, relative to that in the perturbative QGP, near T{sub c} the shear viscosity in the semi-QGP is suppressed by two powers of the Polyakov loop. In a semiclassical expansion, the suppression of colored fields depends only upon which color representation they lie in, and not upon their mass. That light and heavy quarks are suppressed in a common manner may help to explain the behavior of charm quarks at RHIC.

OSTI ID:
21431036
Journal Information:
Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 81, Issue 7; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.81.076002; (c) 2010 The American Physical Society; ISSN 0556-2821
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English