The shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in finite nuclei

Abstract

Experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) suggest that the state of matter produced in the experiments has a low shear-viscosity to entropy-density ratio. We ask here the question what is this ratio in usual finite nuclei at low temperature. We use the experimental and theoretical results for the widths of giant vibrational states in nuclei in order to calculate the above ratio. We find that the values of this ratio are not very different from the ones found in the RHIC experiments.