Bulk and shear viscosities of the gluon plasma in a quasiparticle description

Bulk and shear viscosities of deconfined gluonic matter are investigated within an effective kinetic theory by describing the strongly interacting medium phenomenologically in terms of quasiparticle excitations with medium-dependent self-energies. In this approach, local conservation of energy and momentum follows from a Boltzmann-Vlasov type kinetic equation and guarantees thermodynamic self-consistency. We show that the resulting transport coefficients reproduce the parametric dependencies on temperature and coupling obtained in perturbative QCD at large temperatures and small running coupling. The extrapolation into the non-perturbative regime results in a decreasing specific shear viscosity with decreasing temperature, exhibiting a minimum in the vicinity of the deconfinement transition temperature, while the specific bulk viscosity is sizeable in this region falling off rapidly with increasing temperature. The temperature dependence of specific bulk and shear viscosities found within this quasiparticle description of the pure gluon plasma is in agreement with available lattice QCD results.