Elliptic Flow at Finite Shear Viscosity in a Kinetic Approach at RHIC Original Research Article

Within a covariant parton cascade, we discuss the impact of both finite shear viscosity η and freeze-out dynamics on the elliptic flow generated at RHIC. We find that the enhancement of η/s in the cross-over region of the QGP phase transition cannot be neglected in order to extract the information from the QGP phase. We also point out that the elliptic flow v2(pT) for a fluid at η/s∼0.1−0.2 is consistent with the one needed by quark number scaling drawing a nice consistency between the nearly perfect fluid property of QGP and the coalescence process.