Shear viscosity of a massless quark-gluon gas in chemical equilibrium in terms of all $2\leftrightarrow 2$ cross sections

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Authors: Okey Ohanaka, Zi-Wei Lin
Cited by: 0

Abstract

The analytical expressions of the shear viscosity of both one and two particle species with Boltzmann statistics and $2 \rightarrow 2$ elastic scatterings are known from the Chapman-Enskog method and have been shown to be quite accurate. The expression for a multi-species hadronic gas under $2 \rightarrow 2$ elastic scatterings is also known. Here we use the Chapman-Enskog method to derive the explicit expression of shear viscosity of a massless quark-gluon gas of $N_f$ quark flavors in chemical equilibrium subjected to all $2 \rightarrow 2$ parton scatterings including for the first time inelastic scatterings. We then verify the expression in a general single-species limit, where the shear viscosity of the quark-gluon gas should reduce to the result for a single particle species. In addition, we show the explicit analytical result in terms of the seven independent cross sections for the special case of isotropic and energy-independent cross sections. The analytical expressions derived here can be useful for determining the shear viscosity of parton transport models with any $2 \rightarrow 2$ scattering cross sections. They can also be coupled with finite temperature QCD cross sections to help study the shear viscosity of the quark gluon plasma.

Fields of Study & Subjects

High-Energy Particle Collisions Research Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
8 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint