Relaxation time of non-conformal plasma

We study effective relaxation time of viscous hydrodynamics of strongly coupled non-conformal gauge theory plasma using gauge theory/string theory correspondence. We compute leading corrections to the conformal plasma relaxation time from the relevant deformations due to dim-2 and dim-3 operators. We discuss in details the relaxation time τeff of N=2∗ plasma. For a certain choice of masses this theory undergoes a phase transition with divergent specific heat cV∼|1−Tc/T|−1/2. Although the bulk viscosity remains finite all the way to the critical temperature, we find that τeff diverges near the critical point as τeff∼|1−Tc/T|−1/2.