Diffusion of Conserved Charges in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

We discuss the diffusion currents occurring in a dilute system and show that the charge currents do not only depend on gradients in the corresponding charge density, but also on the other conserved charges in the system—the diffusion currents are therefore coupled. Gradients in one charge thus generate dissipative currents in a different charge. In this approach, we model the Navier-Stokes term of the generated currents to consist of a diffusion coefficient matrix, in which the diagonal entries are the usual diffusion coefficients and the off-diagonal entries correspond to the coupling of different diffusion currents. We evaluate the complete diffusion matrix for a specific hadron gas and for a simplified quark-gluon gas, including baryon, electric and strangeness charge. Our findings are that the off-diagonal entries can range within the same magnitude as the diagonal ones.

Keywords

• Diffusion
• Multiple Charge Conservation
• Heavy Ion Collisions
• Transport Theory