QCD plasma thermalization, collective flow and extraction of shear viscosity

Abstract

Fast thermalization and elliptic flow of QCD matter found at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are understood as the consequence of perturbative QCD (pQCD) interactions within a (3+1) dimensional parton cascade. The main contributions stem from pQCD-inspired bremsstrahlung. We extract the shear viscosity to entropy ratio, which is between 0.08 and 0.15.