Shear and bulk viscosities of strongly-interacting 'infinite' parton-hadron matter within the parton-hadron-string transport approach

V. Ozvenchuk, O. Linnyk, M. I. Gorenstein, E. L. Bratkovskaya, W. Cassing

Published 2012-12-21, updated 2013-07-03Version 2

We study the shear and bulk viscosities of partonic and hadronic matter as functions of temperature T within the parton-hadron-string dynamics (PHSD) off-shell transport approach. Dynamical hadronic and partonic systems in equilibrium are studied by the PHSD simulations in a finite box with periodic boundary conditions. The ratio of the shear viscosity to entropy density \eta(T)/s(T) from PHSD shows a minimum (with a value of about 0.1) close to the critical temperature T_c, while it approaches the perturbative QCD limit at higher temperatures in line with lattice QCD (lQCD) results. For T<T_c, i.e., in the hadronic phase, the ratio \eta/s rises fast with decreasing temperature due to a strong decrease of the entropy density $s$ in the hadronic phase at decreasing T. Within statistics, we obtain practically the same results in the Kubo formalism and in the relaxation time approximation. The bulk viscosity \zeta(T)---evaluated in the relaxation time approach---is found to strongly depend on the effects of mean fields (or potentials) in the partonic phase. We find a significant rise of the ratio \zeta(T)/s(T) in the vicinity of the critical temperature T_c, when consistently including the scalar mean-field from PHSD, which is also in agreement with that from lQCD calculations. Furthermore, we present the results for the ratio (\eta+ 3\zeta/4)/s, which is found to depend nontrivially on temperature and to generally agree with the lQCD calculations as well. Within the PHSD calculations, the strong maximum of \zeta(T)/\eta(T) close to T_c has to be attributed to mean-field (or potential) effects that in PHSD are encoded in the temperature dependence of the quasiparticle masses, which is related to the infrared enhancement of the resummed (effective) coupling g(T).