The Decoherence Time in High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
2008-11-26 v2
Abstract
We calculate the decoherence time of the ground state wave function of a nucleus in a high energy heavy ion collision. We define this time as the decay time of the ratio Tr D^2 / (Tr D)^2 of traces of the density matrix D. We find that this time is smaller or equal to 1/Q_s, where the saturation scale Q_s is defined within the color glass condensate model of parton saturation. Our result supports the notion that the extremely rapid entropy production deduced for the early stage of heavy ion collisions at collider energies is to a large extent caused by the decoherence of the initial-state wave functions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0512100,
title = {The Decoherence Time in High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions},
author = {Berndt Muller and Andreas Schafer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0512100},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
Final, slightly modified version as it will be published in Phys. Rev. C