Seminar in Hadronic Physics

Viscosity at RHIC - Challenges and Open Problems

Paul Romatschke

University of Washington, Seattle

Viscous Fluid Dynamics has been remarkable successful at descibing experimental data from relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. However, we are still a long way to precision extractions of transport quantities such as the shear viscosity from experimental data. In this talk I will review why this is so, and point out some of the physics behind the current challenges and open problems.