Viscosity of pure-glue QCD from the lattice

Abstract

The shear and bulk viscosities in the Quark-Gluon Plasma are quantities of enormous interest for the collisions of heavy ions at RHIC and the LHC. Using lattices up to ${144}^{3}$ x $36$ in size, and applying gradient flow and blocking methods with high precision, the authors compute these viscosities at $1.5$ times the deconfining transition temperature in the pure glue theory. This shows that obtaining values with dynamical quarks, which can be compared directly to experiment, is feasible in the near future.