Transport properties of the quark-gluon plasma
By Harvey B. Meyer. 2011
213 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Transport properties of a thermal medium determine how its conserved charge densities (for instance the electric charge, energy or momentum) evolve as a function of time and eventually relax back to their equilibrium values. Here the transport properties of the quark-gluon plasma are reviewed from a theoretical perspective. The latter play a key role in the description of heavy-ion collisions, and are an important ingredient in constraining particle production processes in the early universe. We place particular emphasis on lattice QCD calculations of conserved current correlators. These Euclidean correlators are related by an integral transform to spectral functions, whose small-frequency form determines the transport properties via Kubo formulae. The universal hydrodynamic predictions for the small-frequency pole structure of spectral functions are summarized. The viability of a quasiparticle description implies the presence of additional characteristic features in the spectral functions. These features are in stark contrast with the functional form that is found in strongly coupled plasmas via the gauge/gravity duality. A central goal is therefore to determine which of these dynamical regimes the quark-gluon plasma is qualitatively closer to as a function of temperature. We review the analysis of lattice correlators in relation to transport properties, and tentatively estimate what computational effort is required to make decisive progress in this field.
Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fefe4cdbd2f49693f219c71fa2462f643c3ab98
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
- V. Koch
- T. Schaefer
- J. Stachel
- P. Braun-Munzinger
- David Bernecker
- C. Allton
- Harvey B. Meyer
- Gert Aarts
Citations in the corpus
- Electrical conductivity and charge diffusion in thermal QCD from the lattice (2014, background): “[15, 16] contain the first (theoretically controlled) results for the shear and bulk viscosity, see also the review [17].”
- Properties of hot and dense matter from relativistic heavy ion collisions (2015, background): “Some progress has also been achieved in a different area, the calculation of near-equilibrium real time properties of the plasma using response functions [101].”
- Relativistic Fluid Dynamics in and out of Equilibrium (2017, unknown): “[19, 28, 29] [28, 126, 127] [128–130] [131–134] [135, 136] [137] [138–140]”
- Vector correlators in lattice QCD: Methods and applications (2011, methodology): “e spectral density relative to the innitevolume situation. It may be useful in the nite-temperature context, where one wants to determine the distribution of the spectral weight ˆ 33(!;k 3;;L), see [30] and references therein. If one takes the spatial volume to innity, k 3 can be made as small as de”