High statistics lattice study of stress tensor correlators in pure SU(3) gauge theory

Abstract

We compute the Euclidean correlators of the stress tensor in pure SU(3) Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature at zero and finite spatial momenta with lattice simulations. We perform continuum extrapolations using N-tau = 10, 12, 16, 20 lattices with renormalized anisotropy 2. We use these correlators to estimate the shear viscosity of the gluon plasma in the deconfined phase. For T = 1.5T(c), we estimate eta/s = 0.17(2) using an ansatz motivated by hydrodynamics.