Parton equilibration in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Chemical Equilibration in Hadronic Collisions

We study chemical equilibration in out-of-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma using the first principles method of QCD effective kinetic theory, accurate at weak coupling. In longitudinally expanding systems-relevant for relativistic nuclear collisions-we find that for realistic couplings chemical equilibration takes place after hydrodynamization, but well before local thermalization. We estimate that hadronic collisions with final state multiplicities dN_{ch}/dη≳10^{2} live long enough to reach approximate chemical equilibrium, which is consistent with the saturation of strangeness enhancement observed in proton-proton, proton-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus collisions.

Perturbative QCD calculations of elliptic flow and shear viscosity in Au+Au collisions at sqrt[s_{NN}]=200 GeV

The elliptic flow v_{2} and the ratio of the shear viscosity over the entropy density, eta/s, of gluon matter are calculated from the perturbative QCD (pQCD) based parton cascade Boltzmann approach of multiparton scatterings. For Au+Au collisions at sqrt[s]=200A GeV the gluon plasma generates large v_{2} values measured at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Standard pQCD yields eta/s approximately 0.08-0.15 as small as the lower bound found from the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory conjecture.

Shear viscosity in a gluon gas

The relation of the shear viscosity coefficient to the recently introduced transport rate is derived within relativistic kinetic theory. We calculate the shear viscosity over entropy ratio eta/s for a gluon gas, which involves elastic gg-->gg perturbative QCD (PQCD) scatterings as well as inelastic gg<-->ggg PQCD bremsstrahlung. For alpha_{s}=0.3 we find eta/s=0.13 and for alpha_{s}=0.6, eta/s=0.076. The small eta/s values, which suggest strongly coupled systems, are due to the gluon bremsstrahlung incorporated.

Coherent gluon production in very-high-energy heavy-ion collisions

The early stages of a relativistic heavy-ion collision are examined in the framework of an effective classical SU(3) Yang-Mills theory in the transverse plane. We compute the initial energy and number distributions, per unit rapidity, at midrapidity, of gluons produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. We discuss the phenomenological implications of our results in light of the recent Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider data.

Kinetic equation with exact charge conservation

A kinetic master equation for multiplicity distributions is formulated for charged particles which are created or destroyed only in pairs due to the conservation of their Abelian charge. It allows one to study time evolution of the multiplicity distributions in a relativistic many-body system with arbitrary average particle multiplicities. It is shown to reproduce the equilibrium results for both canonical (rare particles) and grand canonical (abundant particles) systems. For canonical systems, the equilibrium multiplicity is much lower and the relaxation time is much shorter than the naive extrapolation from grand canonical results. Implications for chemical equilibration in heavy-ion collisions are also discussed.

Fluctuation probes of quark deconfinement

The size of the average fluctuations of net baryon number and electric charge in a finite volume of hadronic matter differs widely between the confined and deconfined phases. These differences may be exploited as indicators of the formation of a quark-gluon plasma in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, because fluctuations created in the initial state survive until freeze-out due to the rapid expansion of the hot fireball.