Shear Viscosity of Yang-Mills Theory in the Confinement Phase

Abstract

In terms of a simple holographic model, we study the absorption cross section and the shear viscosity of a pure Yang-Mills field at low temperature where the system is in the confinement phase. Then we expect that the glueball states are the dominant modes in this phase. In our holographic model an infrared cutoff r_m is introduced as a parameter which fixes the lowest mass of the glueball. As a result the critical temperature of gluon confinement T_c is estimated to be about 127 MeV. For T < T_c, we find that both the absorption cross section and the shear viscosity are independent of the temperature. Their values are frozen at the values corresponding to the critical point, for 0 < T < T_c. We discuss this behavior by considering the glueball mass and its temperature dependence.