Shear viscosity of pion gas

Abstract

Using chiral perturbation theory we investigate the QCD shear viscosity ($\eta $) to entropy density ($s$) ratio below the deconfinement temperature ($\sim 170$ MeV) with zero baryon number density. It is found that $\eta /s$ of QCD is monotonically decreasing in temperature ($T$) and reaches 0.6 with estimated $\sim 50%$ uncertainty at T=120 MeV. A naive extrapolation of the leading order result shows that $\eta /s$ reaches the $1/4\pi $ minimum bound proposed by Kovtun, Son, and Starinets using string theory methods at $T\sim 210$ MeV. This suggests a phase transition or cross over might occur at $T\lesssim 210$ MeV in order for the bound to remain valid. Also, it is natural for $\eta /s$ to stay close to the minimum bound around the phase transition temperature as was recently found in heavy ion collisions.