Energy-momentum tensor correlators and viscosity

Collective flow has been observed in heavy ion collisions, with a large anisotropic component, and ideal hydrodynamic calculations had significant successful in describing the distribution of produced particles at the RHIC experiments. In order to account for this near ideal fluid behavior, the shear and bulk viscosity of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) must be computed from first principles in a regime where the QGP is not weakly coupled. In this talk I describe recent progress in computing energy-momentum tensor correlators on the lattice from which the viscosities can be extracted via Kubo formulas. I also show how to cumulate information from several channels, including at non-vanishing spatial momentum, in order to best constrain the viscosities. These methods should soon yield predictions at the higher temperatures that will be explored at the LHC experiments.

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