English

Thermalization of mini-jets in a quark-gluon plasma

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2016-11-23 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment Nuclear Experiment Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We present the complete physical picture for the evolution of a high-energy jet propagating through a weakly-coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP) by analytical and numerical investigation of thermalization of the soft components of the jet. Our results support the following physical picture: the leading particle emits a significant number of mini-jets which promptly evolve via multiple branching and thus degrade into a myriad of soft gluons, with energies of the order of the medium temperature TT. Via elastic collisions with the medium constituents, these soft gluons relax to local thermal equilibrium with the plasma over a time scale which is considerably shorter than the typical lifetime of the mini-jet. The thermalized gluons form a tail which lags behind the hard components of the jet. Together with the background QGP, they behave hydrodynamically.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.09353,
  title  = {Thermalization of mini-jets in a quark-gluon plasma},
  author = {Edmond Iancu and Bin Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.09353},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures, proceedings of Quark Matter 2015, Kobe, Japan. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.04464