EPJ Web of Conferences 117, 03004 (2016)
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201611703004

Shear viscosity of QGP and the anisotropic flows within an event by event transport approach

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Catania, Via S. Sofia 64, I-95123 Catania, Italy
² INFN-Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, Via S. Sofia 62, I-95123 Catania, Italy

Published online: 11 May 2016

Abstract

We have employed a relativistic kinetic transport approach that incorporates initial state fluctuations to study the effect of a temperature dependent shear viscosity to entropy density ratio η/s(T) on the build-up of the anisotropic flows υ_n(p_T). We find that at LHC energies and for ultra-central collisions (0 – 0.2%) the υ_n(p_T) have a stronger sensitivity to the T dependence of η/s in the QGP phase and this sensitivity increases with the order of the harmonic n. Moreover we have studied the correlation between the initial spatial anisotropies ϵ_n and the final flow coefficients 〈υ_n〉 for different centralities and for the two beam energies. The study shows that at LHC energies there is more correlation than at RHIC energies. In particular at LHC energies and for ultra-central collisions the linear correlation coefficient C(ϵ_n, υ_n) ≈ 1 for n = 2, 3, 4 and 5 suggesting that the 〈υ_n〉 are strongly related to the initial value of ϵ_n.