https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20146604031
Equilibrium and equilibration in a gluon plasma with improved matrix elements
Department of Chemistry and Physics, Arkansas State University, P.O. Box 419, State University, AR 72467-0419, U.S.A.
a e-mail: bzhang@astate.edu
Published online: 20 March 2014
The hot and dense matter created in the early stage of a relativistic heavy ion collision is composed mainly of gluons. Radiative processes can play an important role for the thermalization of such partonic systems. The simplest parton number changing processes are commonly described by the Gunion-Bertsch formula. We show that the cross section from the exact matrix element for the lowest order radiative process could be significantly smaller than that based on the Gunion-Bertsch formula. In light of this, we discuss the role of radiative processes on the equilibrium and equilibration of a gluon plasma.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2014
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
