2013/03/19 by Aleksi Kurkela, Kurkela, Aleksi
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1303.4639
8 pages, 4 figures; presentation at Xth Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, 8-12 October 2012, Munich, Germany
arxiv created 2013/03/19 · arxiv updated 2013/03/20
Hydrodynamical analysis of experimental data of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions seems to indicate that the hot QCD matter created in the collisions thermalizes very quickly. Theoretically, we have no idea why this should be true. In this proceeding, I will describe how the thermalization takes place in the most theoretically clean limit -- that of large nuclei at asymptotically high energy per nucleon, where the system is described by weak-coupling QCD. In this limit, plasma instabilities dominate the dynamics from immediately after the collision until well after the plasma becomes nearly in equilibrium at time t α^(-5/2)Q^(-1).