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Shear viscosity from perturbative quantum chromodynamics to the hadron resonance gas at finite baryon, strangeness, and electric charge densities

Isabella Danhoni1,*, Jordi Salinas San Martín2, and Jacquelyn Noronha-Hostler2

  • *Contact author: idanhoni@theorie.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de
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Phys. Rev. D 111, 116006 – Published 9 June, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/gckr-c2yg

Abstract

Through model-to-data comparisons from heavy-ion collisions, it has been shown that the quark gluon plasma has an extremely small shear viscosity at vanishing densities. At large baryon densities, significantly less is known about the nature of the shear viscosity from quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Within heavy-ion collisions, there are three conserved charges: baryon number (B), strangeness (S), and electric charge (Q). Here we calculate the shear viscosity in two limits using perturbative QCD (pQCD) and an excluded-volume hadron resonance gas at finite BSQ densities. We then develop a framework that interpolates between these two limits such that shear viscosity is possible to calculate across a wide range of finite BSQ densities. We find that the pQCD and hadron resonance gas calculations have different BSQ density dependencies such that a rather nontrivial shear viscosity appears at finite densities.

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Phys. Rev. D 111, 116006– Published 9 June, 2025
  • Received 8 July 2024
  • Accepted 21 May 2025
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