2018/11/30 by Aleksi Kurkela, Aleksas Mazeliauskas · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.122.142301
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 142301 (2019) · 7 pages, 3 figures, see also our companion paper arXiv:1811.03068, v2 small changes, published version
arxiv created 2019/04/26 · arxiv updated 2019/04/30
We study chemical equilibration in out-of-equilibrium Quark-Gluon Plasma using the first principles method of QCD effective kinetic theory, accurate at weak coupling. In longitudinally expanding systems--relevant for relativistic nuclear collisions--we find that for realistic couplings chemical equilibration takes place after hydrodynamization, but well before local thermalization. We estimate that hadronic collisions with final state multiplicities dNch/dη\gtrsim 102 live long enough to reach approximate chemical equilibrium, which is consistent with the saturation of strangeness enhancement observed in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions.