Extracting the bulk viscosity of the quark–gluon plasma

Abstract

We investigate the implications of a nonzero bulk viscosity coefficient on the azimuthal momentum anisotropy of ultracentral relativistic heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. We find that, with IP-Glasma initial conditions, a finite bulk viscosity coefficient leads to a better description of the flow harmonics in ultracentral collisions. We then extract optimal values of bulk and shear viscosity coefficients that provide the best agreement with flow harmonic coefficients data in this centrality class.