Dissipation, Collective Flow and Mach Cones at RHIC
Abstract
Fast thermalization and a strong buildup of elliptic flow of QCD matter as found at RHIC are understood as the consequence of perturbative QCD (pQCD) interactions within the 3+1 dimensional parton cascade BAMPS. The main contributions stem from pQCD bremsstrahlung 2 3 processes. By comparing to Au+Au data of the flow parameter v2 the shear viscosity to entropy ratio η/s has been extracted dynamically and lies in the range of 0.08 and 0.2. Also jet-quenching has been investigated consistently within a full dynamical picture of the heavy ion collision. The results for gluonic jets indicate a slightly too large suppression, but are encouraging to understand the two major phenomena, strong flow and jet-quenching, within a unified microscopic treatment of kinetic processes. In addition, simulations on the temporal propagation of dissipative shock waves lead to the observation that an η/s ratio larger than 0.2 prevents the development of well-defined shock waves on timescales typical for ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.