Anisotropic shear viscosity of a strongly coupled non-Abelian plasma from magnetic branes

Understand

Recent estimates for the electromagnetic fields produced in the early stages of non-central ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions indicate the presence of magnetic fields $B\sim \mathcal{O}(0.1-15\,m_\pi^2)$, where $m_\pi$ is the pion mass.

• It is then of special interest to study the effects of strong (Abelian) magnetic fields on the transport coefficients of strongly coupled non-Abelian plasmas, such as the quark-gluon plasma formed in heavy ion collisions.
• In this work we study the anisotropy in the shear viscosity induced by an external magnetic field in a strongly coupled $\mathcal{N} = 4$ SYM plasma.
• Due to the spatial anisotropy created by the magnetic field, the most general viscosity tensor of a magnetized plasma has 5 shear viscosity coefficients and 2 bulk viscosities.