Thermalization of gluons in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions by including three-body interactions in a parton cascade

By Zhe Xu, Carsten Greiner. 2004

329 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop a new 3 + 1 dimensional Monte Carlo cascade solving the kinetic on-shell Boltzmann equations for partons including the inelastic gg{r_reversible}ggg pQCD processes. The back reaction channel is treated - for the first time - fully consistently within this scheme. An extended stochastic method is used to solve the collision integral. The frame dependence and convergency are studied for a fixed tube with thermal initial conditions. The detailed numerical analysis shows that the stochastic method is fully covariant and that convergency is achieved more efficiently than within a standard geometrical formulation of the collision term, especially for high gluon interaction rates. The cascade is then applied to simulate parton evolution and to investigate thermalization of gluons for a central Au+Au collision at RHIC energy. For this study the initial conditions are assumed to be generated by independent minijets with p{sub T}>p{sub 0}=2 GeV. With that choice it is demonstrated that overall kinetic equilibration is driven mainly by the inelastic processes and is achieved on a scale of 1 fm/c. The further evolution of the expanding gluonic matter in the central region then shows almost an ideal hydrodynamical behavior. In addition, full chemical equilibration of the gluons follows onmore » a longer time scale of about 3 fm/c.« less

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62a92b6d30bab8b4588eb07b4eaa942d199e2c5b

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Small System Collectivity in Relativistic Hadronic and Nuclear Collisions (2018, unknown): “Two such examples are the bamps (Boltzmann Approach to Multi-Parton Scatterings) (119) and ampt (A Multi-Phase Transport) (120) models.”
Collective Phenomena in the Non-Equilibrium Quark-Gluon Plasma (2008, methodology): “With the collisions included, our system will be similar to that used in parton cascade simulations [202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 58, 209] with one big advantage.”
Heavy-flavour and quarkonium production in the LHC era: from proton–proton to heavy-ion collisions (2015, methodology): “In the BAMPS model [541, 599], the initial heavy quark distribution is obtained from MC@NLO [47, 153] for pp collisions through scaling with the number of binary collisions to heavy-ion collisions without taking cold nuclear matter effects into account.”
Momentum broadening in an anisotropic plasma (2006, background): “On the other hand, perturbative estimates of the thermalization time [2] result in much larger values, seemingly excluding the possibility of rapid thermalization (see however [3]) .”
Relativistic Fluid Dynamics in and out of Equilibrium (2017, methodology): “Once hadrons have been generated from the Monte-Carlo procedure, their dynamics can be simulated by standard particle cascade codes [341, 344–347].”