Elliptic flow and shear viscosity of the shattered color glass condensate

Abstract

In this contribution, we report on our results about the computation of the elliptic flow of the quark-gluon-plasma produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions, simulating the expansion of the fireball by solving the relativistic Boltzmann equation for the parton distribution function tuned at a fixed shear viscosity to entropy density ratio η/s. We emphasize the role of saturation in the initial gluon spectrum modelling the shattering of the color glass condensate, causing the initial distribution to be out of equilibrium. We find that the saturation reduces the efficiency in building-up the elliptic flow, even if the thermalization process is quite fast τtherm ≈ 0.8fm/c. and the pressure isotropization even faster τisotr ≈ 0.3fm/c. The impact of the initial non-equilibrium manifests for non-central collisions and can modify the estimate of the viscosity respect to the assumption of full thermalization in pT-space.