A theoretical framework for the calculation of shear and bulk viscosities of hadronic matter at finite temperature is presented. The framework is based on the quasi-particle picture. It allows for an arbitrary number of hadron species with point-like interactions, and allows for both elastic and inelastic collisions. Detailed balance is ensured. The particles have temperature dependent masses arising from mean field or potential effects, which maintains self-consistency between the equation of state and the transport coefficients. As an example, we calculate the shear and bulk viscosity in the linear σ model. The ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density shows a minimum in the vicinity of a rapid crossover transition, while the ratio of bulk viscosity to entropy density shows a maximum.

The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission Level-4 Soil Moisture (L4_SM) product provides 3-hourly, 9-km resolution, global estimates of surface (0–5 cm) and root-zone (0–100 cm) soil moisture and related land surface variables from 31 March 2015 to present with ~2.5-day latency. The ensemble-based L4_SM algorithm assimilates SMAP brightness temperature (Tb) observations into the Catchment land surface model. This study describes the spatially distributed L4_SM analysis and assesses the observation-minus-forecast (O − F) Tb residuals and the soil moisture and temperature analysis increments. Owing to the climatological rescaling of the Tb observations prior to assimilation, the analysis is essentially unbiased, with global mean values of ~0.37 K for the O − F Tb residuals and practically zero for the soil moisture and temperature increments. There are, however, modest regional (absolute) biases in the O − F residuals (under ~3 K), the soil moisture increments (under ~0.01 m3 m−3), and the surface soil temperature increments (under ~1 K). Typical instantaneous values are ~6 K for O − F residuals, ~0.01 (~0.003) m3 m−3 for surface (root zone) soil moisture increments, and ~0.6 K for surface soil temperature increments. The O − F diagnostics indicate that the actual errors in the system are overestimated in deserts and densely vegetated regions and underestimated in agricultural regions and transition zones between dry and wet climates. The O − F autocorrelations suggest that the SMAP observations are used efficiently in western North America, the Sahel, and Australia, but not in many forested regions and the high northern latitudes. A case study in Australia demonstrates that assimilating SMAP observations successfully corrects short-term errors in the L4_SM rainfall forcing.

We calculate the quark number susceptibility in the deconfined phase of QCD using the hard thermal loop (HTL) approximation for the quark propagator. This improved perturbation theory takes into account important medium effects such as thermal quark masses and Landau damping in the quark-gluon plasma. We explicitly show that the Landau damping part in the quark propagator for spacelike quark momenta does not contribute to the quark number susceptibility due to the quark number conservation. We find that the quark number susceptibility only due to the collective quark modes deviates from the free one around the critical temperature but approaches free results at infinite temperature limit. The results are in conformity with recent lattice calculations.In recent years substantial experimental and theoretical efforts have been undertaken to investigate the versatile physics issues involved in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, i.e., collisions of atomic nuclei in which centre-of-mass energy per nucleon is much larger than the nucleon rest mass. The principal goal of this initiative is to explore the phase structure of the underlying theory of strong interactions -Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) -by creating in the laboratory a new state of matter, the so-called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). This new state of matter is predicted to exist under extreme conditions like at high temperatures and/or densities, when a phase transition takes place from a hadronic to a deconfined state of quarks and gluons [1]. Such information has essentially been confirmed by numerical lattice QCD calculations [2] at finite temperature, which show a rapid increase in energy density and entropy density as a function of temperature. Numerical solutions of QCD also suggest that the critical temperature is about 160 MeV [3] and provide information on the equation of state [4].The various measurements taken at CERN SPS within the Lead Beam Programme do lead to strong 'circumstantial evidence' for the formation of the QGP [5,6]. Evidence is circumstantial as any direct formation of the QGP cannot be identified. Only by some noble indirect diagnostic probes like the suppression of the J/Ψ particle, the enhanced production of strange particles, specially strange antibaryons, excess production of photons and dileptons, the formation of disoriented chiral condensates, etc. the discovery can be achieved. An extensive amount of theoretical study has also been devoted over the last two decades in favour of these well accepted probes of a deconfinement (QGP) phase.Recently screening and fluctuation of conserved quantities have been considered as an important and relevant probes of the QGP formation in heavy-ion collisions [7][8][9][10]. In the confined/chirally broken phase charges are associated with the hadrons in integer units whereas in the deconfined/chirally restored phase they are associated with the quarks in fractional units which could lead to charge fluctuations which are different in the two phases [7,10]. The fluctuations can generally be r...

Using the high temperature approximation we study, within the linear response theory, the wake in the quark-gluon plasma by a fast parton owing to dynamical screening in the space like region. When the parton moves with a speed less than the average speed of the plasmon, we find that the wake structure corresponds to a screening charge cloud traveling with the parton with one sign flip in the induced charge density resulting in a Lennard-Jones type potential in the outward flow with a short range repulsive and a long range attractive part. On the other hand if the parton moves with a speed higher than that of plasmon, the wake structure in the induced charge density is found to have alternate sign flips and the wake potential in the outward flow oscillates analogous to Cerenkov like wave generation with a Mach cone structure trailing the moving parton. The potential normal to the motion of the parton indicates a transverse flow in the system. We also calculate the potential due to a color dipole and discuss consequences of possible new bound states and $J/\psi$ suppression in the quark-gluon plasma.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures (high resolution figures available with authors); version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.