Eur. Phys. J. C (2009) 59: 705-714
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-008-0814-0

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Viscosity and thermodynamic properties of QGP in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

¹ Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, 208 016, UP, India
² Raman Research Institute, C.V. Raman Avenue, Sadashivanagar, Bangalore, 560 080, India

^* e-mail: vinodc@iitk.ac.in

Received: 30 May 2008
Revised: 15 November 2008
Published online: 3 December 2008

Abstract

We study the viscosity and thermodynamic properties of QGP at RHIC by employing the recently extracted equilibrium distribution functions from two hot QCD equations of state of O(g ⁵) and O(g ⁶ln (1/g)), respectively. After obtaining the temperature dependence of the energy density and the entropy density, we focus our attention on the determination of the shear viscosity for a rapidly expanding interacting plasma, as a function of temperature. We find that the interactions significantly decrease the shear viscosity. They decrease the viscosity to entropy density ratio, as well.