Magnetoviscosity of relativistic plasma

TL;DR

This paper calculates how strong magnetic fields cause anisotropic shear and bulk viscosities in relativistic plasmas, revealing significant effects relevant to astrophysics and heavy-ion collision experiments.

Contribution

It provides the first quantum field-theoretical calculation of anisotropic viscosities in strongly magnetized relativistic plasmas, including new insights into their magnetic field dependence.

Findings

Longitudinal shear viscosity increases with magnetic field.

Transverse shear viscosity decreases and can drop below the KSS bound.

Bulk viscosities show non-monotonic behavior with magnetic field.

Abstract

Using first-principles quantum field-theoretical methods, we investigate the shear and bulk viscosities of strongly magnetized relativistic plasmas. The analysis is performed within the weak-coupling approximation and utilizes known results for the fermion damping rates in the Landau-level representation, $\Gamma_{n}(p_{z})$, which are dominated by one-to-two and two-to-one processes in the presence of a strong magnetic field. The transverse and longitudinal components of the viscosities are derived using Kubo's linear response theory. Our results reveal a pronounced anisotropy in both shear and bulk viscosities induced by the magnetic field. In the case of an electron-positron plasma, where the weak-coupling approximation is well justified, the dimensionless longitudinal shear viscosity $\eta_{\parallel}/T^3$ increases rapidly with the magnetic field strength, while the transverse component $\eta_{\perp}/T^3$ decreases and can even drop below the KSS bound at sufficiently large fields. In contrast, both the dimensionless longitudinal and transverse bulk viscosities, $\zeta_{\perp}/T^3$ and $\zeta_{\parallel}/T^3$, initially rise from small values, reach a maximum, and then gradually decrease toward zero. We find that the bulk viscosity is highly sensitive to the longitudinal and transverse components of the sound velocity, particularly at high magnetic fields, indicating that its quantitative values should be interpreted with caution. We also calculate an additional cross viscosity, which is negative and whose magnitude increases with the magnetic field strength. Finally, we discuss the physical implications of these magnetoviscosity results in the contexts of magnetar physics and the strongly magnetized quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy-ion collisions.