Effect of shear viscosity on spectra, elliptic flow, and Hanbury Brown–Twiss radii

Here we calculate the first correction to the thermal distribution function of an expanding gas due to shear viscosity. With this modified distribution function we estimate viscous corrections to spectra, elliptic flow, and Hanbury Brown--Twiss (HBT) radii in hydrodynamic simulations of heavy ion collisions using the blast wave model. For reasonable values of the shear viscosity, viscous corrections become of the order of 1 when the transverse momentum of the particle is larger than 1.7 GeV. This places a bound on the ${p}_{T}$ range accessible to hydrodynamics for this observable. Shear corrections to elliptic flow cause ${v}_{2}{(p}_{T})$ to veer below the ideal results for…