Seminar in Hadronic Physics

Hot and Dense QCD Shear viscosity at (almost) NLO

Isabella Danhoni

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The next-to-leading order weak-coupling shear viscosity of QCD was computed in 2018 by Ghiglieri, Moore, and Teaney for vanishing baryon chemical potential, μ = 0. However, intermediate-energy heavy ion collisions and merging neutron stars phenomena may explore the Quark-Gluon Plasma in a regime with large baryon chemical potentials. Motivated by that, we extended the next-to-leading order shear viscosity calculations to finite μ in this work.  We present results showing that, although the convergence of the weak-coupling expansion is questionable for achievable plasmas, we observe an improvement at μ > T compared to the μ = 0 case.