On viscous flow and azimuthal anisotropy of the quarkgluon plasma in a strong magnetic field

We calculate the viscous pressure tensor of the quarkgluon plasma in a strong magnetic field. It is azimuthally anisotropic and is characterized by five shear viscosity coefficients, four of which vanish when the field strength eB is much larger than the plasma temperature squared. We argue that the azimuthally anisotropic viscous pressure tensor generates the asymmetric transverse flow. As an illustration, we consider nonrelativistic plasma flow in a very strong constant magnetic field; azimuthal asymmetry in this case is as large as 1/3, even not taking into account the collision geometry. This result suggests that the magnitude of the shear viscosity extracted from the experimental data ignoring the magnetic field must be underestimated, although a more quantitative estimate warrants further numerical investigation. Disciplines Astrophysics and Astronomy | Physics Comments This is a manuscript of an article from Journal of Physics G 39 ( 2012): 025010, doi: : 10.1088/0954-3899/39/ 2/025010. Posted with permission. This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/physastro_pubs/155 On viscous flow and azimuthal anisotropy of quark-gluon plasma in strong magnetic field Kirill Tuchin1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011 (Dated: August 23, 2011) We calculate the viscous pressure tensor of the quark-gluon plasma in strong magnetic field. It is azimuthally anisotropic and is characterized by five shear viscosity coefficients, four of which vanish when the field strength eB is much larger than the plasma temperature squared. We argue, that the azimuthally anisotropic viscous pressure tensor generates the transverse flow with asymmetry as large as 1/3, even not taking into account the collision geometry. We conclude, that the magnitude of the shear viscosity extracted from the experimental data ignoring the magnetic field must be underestimated.