The viscosity of quark-gluon plasma at RHIC and the LHC

Abstract

The specific shear viscosity (eta/s)_QGP of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) can be extracted from elliptic flow data in heavy-ion collisions by comparing them with the dynamical model VISHNU which couples a viscous fluid dynamic description of the QGP with a microscopic kinetic description of the late hadronic rescattering and freeze-out stage. A robust method for fixing (eta/s)_QGP from the collision centrality dependence of the eccentricity-scaled charged hadron elliptic flow is presented. The systematic uncertainties associated with this extraction method are discussed, with specific attention to our presently restricted knowledge of initial conditions. With the (eta/s)_QGP extracted in this way, VISHNU yields an excellent description of all soft-hadron data from Au+Au collisions at top RHIC energy. Extrapolations to Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC, using both a purely hydrodynamic approach and VISHNU, are presented and compared with recent experimental results from the ALICE Collaboration. The LHC data are again well described by VISHNU, with the same (eta/s)_QGP value as at RHIC energies.