The shear viscosity of parton matter under anisotropic scatterings

Abstract

The shear viscosity $\eta$ of a quark-gluon plasma in equilibrium can be calculated analytically using multiple methods or numerically using the Green-Kubo relation. It has been realized, which we confirm here, that the Chapman-Enskog method agrees well with the Green-Kubo result for both isotropic and anisotropic two-body scatterings. We then apply the Chapman-Enskog method to study the shear viscosity of the parton matter from a multi-phase transport model, which can be considered as a plasma in full thermal equilibrium but partial chemical equilibrium. In particular, we study the parton matter in the center cell of central and midcentral Au+Au collisions at $200A$ GeV and Pb+Pb collisions at $2760A$ GeV. As a result of using a constant Debye mass or cross section $\sigma$ for parton scatterings, the $\eta/s$ ratio increases with time (as the effective temperature decreases), contrary to the trend preferred by Bayesian analysis of the experimental data or pQCD results that use temperature-dependent Debye masses. At $\sigma=3$ mb that enables the transport model to approximately reproduce the elliptic flow data of the bulk matter, the average $\eta/s$ of the parton matter in partial equilibrium is found to be very small, between one to two times $1/(4\pi)$.