Paper detail

Percolation of Color Sources and the Shear Viscosity of the QGP in Central A-A Collisions at RHIC and LHC Energies

The Color String Percolation Model (CSPM) is used to determine the shear viscosity to entropy ratio ($η/s$) of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) produced in Au-Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV at RHIC and Pb-Pb at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV at LHC. The relativistic kinetic theory relation for $η/s$ is evaluated using CSPM values for the temperature and the mean free path of the QGP constituents. The experimental charged hadron transverse momentum spectrum is used to determine the percolation density parameter $ξ$ in Au-Au collisions (STAR). For Pb-Pb at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV $ξ$ values are obtained from the extrapolation at RHIC energy. The value of $η/s$ is 0.204$\pm$0.020 and 0.262$\pm$0.026 at the CSPM initial temperatures of 193.6$\pm$3 MeV (RHIC) and 262.2 $\pm$13 MeV (LHC) respectively. These values are 2.5 and 3.3 times the AdS/CFT conjectured lower bound $1/4π$. We compare the CSPM $η/s$ analytic expression with weak coupling (wQGP) and strong coupling (sQGP) calculations. This indicates that the QGP is a strongly coupled fluid in the phase transition region.