From color glass condensate to quark–gluon plasma through the event horizon

By D. Kharzeev, K. Tuchin. 2005

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We propose a new thermalization scenario for heavy ion collisions which at sufficiently high energies implies the phase transition to the quark–gluon plasma. The key ingredient of our approach is the Hawking–Unruh effect: an observer moving with an acceleration a experiences the influence of a thermal bath with an effective temperature T = a / 2 π , similar to the one present in the vicinity of a black hole horizon. For electric charges moving in external electromagnetic fields of realistic strength, the resulting temperature appears too small to be detected. However for partons in strong color fields the effect should be observable: in the color glass condensate picture, the strength of the color-electric field is E ∼ Q s 2 / g ( Q s is the saturation scale, and g is the strong coupling), the typical acceleration is a ∼ Q s , and the heat bath temperature is T = Q s / 2 π ∼ 200 MeV . In nuclear collisions at sufficiently high energies the effect can induce a rapid thermalization over the time period of τ ≃ 2 π / Q s ≃ 1 fm accompanied by phase transitions. We consider a specific example of chiral symmetry restoration induced by a rapid deceleration of the colliding nuclei. We argue that parton saturation in the initial nuclear wave functions is a necessary precondition for the formation of quark–gluon plasma. We discuss the implications of our “black hole thermalization” scenario for various observables in relativistic heavy ion collisions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/438dd2f4861f569aa88f43e3868af9c25c3d7b0a

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Citations in the corpus

Worldline instantons and the fluctuation prefactor (2006, background): “The nonperturbative phenomenon of vacuum pair production [19, 20] has applications in many fields of physics [21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27].”
Worldline instantons and pair production in inhomogenous fields (2005, background): “One of the most interesting nonperturbative phemonena is vacuum pair production [15, 16, 17], which has applications in many fields of physics [18], ranging from particle and nuclear physics [19, 20] to cosmology [21, 22, 23].”
The Unruh effect and its applications (2007, background): “A different sort of question which one may pose is whether or not sufficiently accelerated Rindler observers would see broken symmetries being restored because of the high temperature of the Unruh thermal bath (Ebert and Zhukovsky, 2007; Hill, 1985; Kharzeev and Tuchin, 2005; Ohsaku, 2004).”