Shear viscosity from thermal fluctuations in relativistic conformal fluid dynamics

TL;DR

This paper calculates how thermal fluctuations affect the shear viscosity in relativistic conformal fluids, showing that for strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma near the AdS/CFT bound, the correction is positive and up to 10%, while negligible for weakly coupled theories.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify thermal fluctuation contributions to shear viscosity in relativistic fluids, especially relevant for quark-gluon plasma near the strongly coupled regime.

Findings

Thermal fluctuations contribute up to 10% to shear viscosity near the AdS/CFT bound.

For weakly coupled theories, the correction is negligible even at low shear viscosity.

The correction is small but significant for strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions.

Abstract

Within the framework of relativistic fluctuating hydrodynamics we compute the contribution of thermal fluctuations to the effective infrared shear viscosity of a conformal fluid, focusing on quadratic (in fluctuations), second order (in velocity gradients) terms in the conservation equations. Our approach is based on the separation of hydrodynamic fields in soft and ultrasoft sectors, in which the effective shear viscosity arises due to the action of the soft modes on the evolution of the ultrasoft ones. We find that for a strongly coupled fluid with small shear viscosity--to--entropy ratio $\eta/s$ the contribution of thermal fluctuations to the effective shear viscosity is small but significant. Using realistic estimates for the strongly coupled quark--gluon plasma created in heavy ion collisions, we find that for $\eta/s$ close to the AdS/CFT lower bound $1/(4\pi)$ the correction is positive and at most amounts to 10% in the temperature range 200--300 MeV, whereas for larger values $\eta/s \sim 2/(4\pi)$ the correction is negligible. For weakly coupled theories the correction is very small even for $\eta/s=0.08$ and can be neglected.