Shear induced cavitation in radially expanding, chemically equilibrating QGP
Abstract
We present the first study of shear viscosity induced cavitation incorporating transverse expansion alongside chemical non-equilibrium dynamics in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Chemical non-equilibrium is incorporated through quark and gluon fugacities, whose evolution is coupled to causal dissipative relativistic hydrodynamics in the Gubser geometry. Using phenomenological temperature-dependent shear viscosity parametrizations, we study the evolution of the longitudinal pressure and identify the conditions under which it becomes negative and thereby breaking down the hydrodynamic description. We demonstrate that shear induced cavitation develops first at the centre of the fireball (r=0) at early times and subsequently extends towards larger radial distances, with transverse expansion accelerating its onset, while persisting during chemical equilibration. Within our framework, we determine the critical initial shear viscosity (η/s)crit, below which cavitation does not occur throughout the QGP evolution. Since hydrodynamics is found to successfully describe the phenomenology of heavy-ion collisions, our results provide a constraint on shear viscosity requiring the absence of cavitation during the QGP evolution. We find that the phenomenologically extracted η/s from JETSCAPE analyses lie below the critical shear viscosity (η/s)crit obtained in our framework.
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BibTeX
@misc{naik2026shear,
title = {{Shear induced cavitation in radially expanding, chemically equilibrating QGP}},
author = {Lakshmi J. Naik and V. Sreekanth},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.22948},
eprint = {2609.22948},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22948},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Shear induced cavitation in radially expanding, chemically equilibrating QGP
AU - Lakshmi J. Naik
AU - V. Sreekanth
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.22948
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22948
AB - We present the first study of shear viscosity induced cavitation incorporating transverse expansion alongside chemical non-equilibrium dynamics in the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Chemical non-equilibrium is incorporated through quark and gluon fugacities, whose evolution is coupled to causal dissipative relativistic hydrodynamics in the Gubser geometry. Using phenomenological temperature-dependent shear viscosity parametrizations, we study the evolution of the longitudinal pressure and identify the conditions under which it becomes negative and thereby breaking down the hydrodynamic description. We demonstrate that shear induced cavitation develops first at the centre of the fireball (r=0) at early times and subsequently extends towards larger radial distances, with transverse expansion accelerating its onset, while persisting during chemical equilibration. Within our framework, we determine the critical initial shear viscosity (η/s)_crit, below which cavitation does not occur throughout the QGP evolution. Since hydrodynamics is found to successfully describe the phenomenology of heavy-ion collisions, our results provide a constraint on shear viscosity requiring the absence of cavitation during the QGP evolution. We find that the phenomenologically extracted η/s from JETSCAPE analyses lie below the critical shear viscosity (η/s)_crit obtained in our framework.
ER -