The approach to equilibrium in a quark-gluon plasma

Conference · Thu Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1987

OSTI ID:5871574

Heinz, U

The basic questions to be addressed in this paper are: How does the quark-gluon plasma, once formed in heavy-ion collisions, approach equilibrium. What are the basic equilibrium time scales - how do they compare with the plasma lifetime before hadronization and freeze-out set in. In particular, how do the strong color anisotropies, which are presumably present in the initial formation stage disappear and how fast, if at all, do the color degrees of freedom attain local equilibrium. The approach that I wish to present here involves the following chain of arguments: equilibration is related to dissipation of energy and creation of entropy; it is determined by the dissipative, i.e., imaginary part of certain response functions - for example, to calculate the rate of dissipation for a density perturbation in an equilibrium plasma we need to work out the imaginary part of the retarded density-density correlation function; this imaginary part of the response function is dominated by its poles which signal collective modes - for example, phonons in the density-density correlation function, (colored) plasmons in the electric and magnetic response functions, etc.; from the imaginary part one can calculate a damping rate ..gamma.. for these collective modes which in turn yields an estimate for the equilibration time scale tau/sub equ/ approx. h-bar/..gamma... In this contribution I will concentrate on color equilibration and thus focus on color electric and magnetic plasma oscillations and their damping rates. 21 refs.

• Research Organization: Brookhaven National Lab., Upton, NY (USA)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-76CH00016
• OSTI ID: 5871574
• Report Number(s): BNL-40359; CONF-8708166-2; ON: DE88002117
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

645200* -- High Energy Physics-- Particle Interactions & Properties-Theoretical
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
COLOR MODEL
COMPOSITE MODELS
CORRELATION FUNCTIONS
DISPERSIONS
ENTROPY
EQUILIBRIUM PLASMA
FUNCTIONS
GAUGE INVARIANCE
HAMILTONIANS
INTERACTIONS
INVARIANCE PRINCIPLES
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
MATHEMATICAL OPERATORS
PARTICLE INTERACTIONS
PARTICLE MODELS
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES
PLASMA
PLASMONS
QUANTUM OPERATORS
QUARK MODEL
QUARK-GLUON INTERACTIONS
QUASI PARTICLES
THERMODYNAMIC PROPERTIES