Viscosity and thermodynamic properties of QGP in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Vinod Chandra, V. Ravishankar

Published 2008-05-30, updated 2008-11-28Version 2

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 $O(g^6\ln(1/g))$ respectively. After obtaining the temperature dependence of energy density, and entropy density, we focus our attention on the determination of shear viscosity for a rapidly expanding interacting plasma, as a function of temperature. We find that interactions significantly decrease the shear viscosity. They decrease the viscosity to entropy density ratio, $\eta/{\mathcal S}$ as well.