Seminar in Hadronic Physics

What do we know about the shear-viscosity of QCD matter?

Steffen Bass

Duke University

The success of ideal Relativistic Fluid Dynamics (RFD) in describing hadron spectra and elliptic flow at RHIC has led to a strong interest in the transport coefficients of QCD, in particular the shear- and bulk-viscosity as well as the shear-viscosity over entropy-density ratio eta/s. In my talk I will review our current state of knowledge on the shear viscosity of QCD matter at RHIC. In particular I will focus on the question whether low viscosity matter needs to be strongly interacting in the deconfined phase and on recent calculations of eta/s for a hadron gas in and out of chemical equilibrium.