• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.081601
• Corpus ID: 26124611

Shear viscosity of strongly coupled N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma.

@article{Policastro2001ShearVO,
  title={Shear viscosity of strongly coupled N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma.},
  author={Giuseppe Policastro and Dam Thanh Son and Andrei O. Starinets},
  journal={Physical review letters},
  year={2001},
  volume={87 8},
  pages={
          081601
        }
}

• G. Policastro, D. Son, A. Starinets
• Published 6 April 2001
• Physics
• Physical review letters

Using the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence, we relate the shear viscosity eta of the finite-temperature N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in the large N, strong-coupling regime with the absorption cross section of low-energy gravitons by a near-extremal black three-brane. We show that in the limit of zero frequency this cross section coincides with the area of the horizon. From this result we find eta = pi / 8N(2)T3. We conjecture that for finite 't Hooft coupling g(2)(YM)N the shear viscosity is eta = f(g(2)(YM)N)N2T3, where f(x) is a monotonic function that decreases from O(x(-2)ln(-1)(1/x)) at small x to pi/8 when x-->infinity.