Beam Energy Dependence Of The Viscous Damping Of Anisotropic Flow In Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

The flow harmonics v(2,3) for charged hadrons are studied for a broad range of centrality selections and beam collision energies in Au + Au (root s(NN) = 7.7-200 GeV) and Pb + Pb (root s(NN) = 2.76 TeV) collisions. They validate the characteristic signature expected for the system size dependence of viscous damping at each collision energy studied. The extracted viscous coefficients that encode the magnitude of the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density eta/s are observed to decrease to an apparent minimum as the collision energy is increased from root s(NN) = 7.7 to approximately 62.4 GeV; thereafter, they show a slow increase with root s(NN) up to 2.76 TeV. This pattern of viscous damping provides the first experimental constraint for eta/s in the temperature-baryon chemical potential (T, mu B) plane and could be an initial indication for decay trajectories that lie close to the critical end point in the phase diagram for nuclear matter.