Universal properties of bulk viscosity near the QCD phase transition

By F. Karsch, D. Kharzeev, K. Tuchin. 2007

276 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We extract the bulk viscosity of hot quark–gluon matter in the presence of light quarks from the recent lattice data on the QCD equation of state. For that purpose we extend the sum rule analysis by including the contribution of light quarks. We also discuss the universal properties of bulk viscosity in the vicinity of a second-order phase transition, as it might occur in the chiral limit of QCD at fixed strange quark mass and most likely does occur in two-flavor QCD. We point out that a chiral transition in the O ( 4 ) universality class at zero baryon density as well as the transition at the chiral critical point which belongs to the Z ( 2 ) universality class both lead to the critical behavior of bulk viscosity. In particular, the latter universality class implies the divergence of the bulk viscosity, which may be used as a signature of the critical point. We discuss the physical picture behind the dramatic increase of bulk viscosity seen in our analysis, and devise possible experimental tests of related phenomena.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b607d76f9626386bd93f7df281cd8035ae789de3

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Bulk viscosity of strongly coupled plasmas with holographic duals (2008, methodology): “Recent interest has attached to the possibility of a dramatic rise in the bulk viscosity ζ near the cross-over temperature Tc of QCD where confinement and chiral symmetry breaking set in [2, 3].”
Bulk viscosity of QCD matter near the critical temperature (2007, methodology): “The sum rule analysis presented here has been extended to QCD with almost physical quark masses [36], using the recent lattice results on the equation of state [37].”
Holography and thermodynamics of 5D dilaton-gravity (2008, background): “Therefore the bulk viscosity is expected to play a role near the phase transition [23, 24].”
Improved holographic Yang–Mills at finite temperature: Comparison with data (2009, background): “Therefore the bulk viscosity may play a role near the phase transition [5, 6].”
Improved Holographic QCD (2010, background): “Therefore the bulk viscosity may play a role near the phase transition [5, 6].”
Electron viscosity, current vortices and negative nonlocal resistance in graphene (2015, background): “Themodel (4), equipped with the parameter α, provides a convenient way to assess the robustness of our predictions.”