Abstract
A new robust method to extract the specific shear viscosity of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) at temperatures from the centrality dependence of the eccentricity-scaled elliptic flow measured in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions is presented. Coupling viscous fluid dynamics for the QGP with a microscopic transport model for hadronic freeze-out we find for 200 GeV collisions that is a universal function of multiplicity density that depends only on the viscosity but not on the model used for computing the initial fireball eccentricity . Comparing with measurements we find where the uncertainty range is dominated by model uncertainties for the values of used to normalize the measured .
- Received 11 November 2010
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.192301
© 2011 American Physical Society