Quark-gluon Plasma Thermalization and Plasma Instabilities
نویسنده
چکیده
Here is a basic question: What is the (local) thermalization time for quarkgluon plasmas (QGPs) in heavy ion collisions? That’s a difficult question, so let’s ask a simpler one: What is it for arbitrarily high energy collisions, where the running coupling constant is small, αs ≪ 1? Even that turns out to be complicated, so let me focus on an even simpler version, first posed by Baier, Mueller, Schiff and Son: How does that time depend on αs? In particular, in the saturation picture of heavy-ion collisions, what is the exponent n in the relation teq ∼ αs Qs ? (1)
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