Imaginary part of the static gluon propagator in an anisotropic (viscous) QCD plasma

Abstract

We determine viscosity corrections to the retarded, advanced and symmetric gluon self-energies and to the static propagator in the weak-coupling ``hard loop'' approximation to high-temperature QCD. We apply these results to calculate the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential which is found to be smaller (in magnitude) than at vanishing viscosity. This implies a smaller decay width of quarkonium bound states in an anisotropic plasma.