The 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.