Approach to Equilibrium in Weakly Coupled Non-Abelian Plasmas

Aleksi Kurkela and Egang Lu
Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 182301 – Published 28 October 2014

Abstract

We follow the time evolution of non-Abelian gauge bosons from far-from-equilibrium initial conditions to thermal equilibrium by numerically solving an effective kinetic equation that becomes accurate in the weak coupling limit. We consider isotropic initial conditions that are either highly overoccupied or underoccupied. We find that overoccupied systems thermalize through a self-similar cascade reaching equilibrium in multiples of a thermalization time teq72./(1+0.12logλ1)×1/λ2T, whereas underoccupied systems undergo a “bottom-up” thermalization in a time teq[34.+21.log(Q/T)]/(1+0.037logλ1)×(Q/T)1/2/λ2T, where Q is the characteristic momentum scale of the initial condition. We apply this result to model initial stages of heavy-ion collisions and find rapid thermalization roughly in a time Qteq10 or teq1fm/c.

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  • Received 6 June 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.182301

© 2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Aleksi Kurkela1 and Egang Lu2

  • 1Physics Department, Theory Unit, CERN, CH-1211 Genève 23, Switzerland
  • 2Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 rue University, Montréal, Quebec H3A 2T8, Canada

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Issue

Vol. 113, Iss. 18 — 31 October 2014

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