The Shear Viscosity of the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

We investigate the shear viscosity for a quark-gluon plasma under perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (pQCD) at finite temperature with Boltzmann statistics. We start from a previous work where the viscosity was calculated with pQCD cross sections for two-body scatterings of quarks and gluons, but make corrections and adjustments to the cross sections. We then extend the derivation to obtain the analytical expression of shear viscosity of any quark gluon system under two-body interactions. We also examine the analytical result in various limits and the effect of inelastic processes on the shear viscosity.