Related papers: Decoherence and Entropy Production in Relativistic…
We consider time-scales of first-order deconfinement or chiral-symmetry restoring phase transition in high energy heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. Recently it was shown that the system must supercool below $T_c$ before the…
Heavy-ion colliders have revealed the process of "fast thermalization". This experimental breakthrough has led to new theoretical tools to study the thermalization process at both weak and strong coupling. We apply this to the reheating…
The challenge of demonstrating that the matter produced in heavy ion collisions is a deconfined quark-gluon plasma, as predicted by lattice QCD calculations, is the challenge of measuring the number of thermodynamic degrees of freedom \nu ~…
We compute the relaxation time for quark/antiquark spin and thermal vorticity alignment in a quark-gluon plasma at finite temperature and quark chemical potential. We model the interaction of quark/antiquark spin with thermal vorticity as…
The rapid thermalization of quarks and gluons in the initial stages of relativistic heavy-ion collisions is treated using analytic solutions of a nonlinear diffusion equation with schematic initial conditions, and for gluons with boundary…
We compute the entanglement entropy of soft gluons in the wave function of a fast moving hadron and discuss its basic properties. We also derive the expression for entropy production in a high energy hadronic collision within the Color…
For central heavy ion collisions at the RHIC energy, the entropy per unit rapidity dS/dy at freeze-out is extracted with minimal model dependence from available experimental measurements of particle yields, spectra, and source sizes…
We argue that isotropization and, consequently, thermalization of the system of gluons and quarks produced in an ultrarelativistic heavy ion collision does not follow from Feynman diagram analysis to any order in the coupling constant. We…
We study chemical equilibration of quarks and gluons in central nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. The initial quark and gluon densities are taken from earlier studies as well as from recent perturbative QCD estimates and are then…
We introduce the quantitative measures characterizing the rates of decoherence and thermalization of quantum systems. We study the time evolution of these measures in the case of a quantum harmonic oscillator whose relaxation is described…
I review our current understanding of the processes driving the thermalization and isotropization of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) created in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions (URHICs). I begin by discussing the phenomenological…
In nuclear collisions at relativistic energies, matter is created which resembles closely the matter that filled all space until about 15 microseconds after the big bang. Here we summarize selected aspects of the research that led to the…
We study the thermalization of gluons far from thermal equilibrium in relativistic kinetic theory. The initial distribution of gluons is assumed to resemble that in the early stage of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. Only elastic…
The thermal multihadron production observed in different high energy collisions poses many basic problems: why do even elementary, $e^+e^-$ and hadron-hadron, collisions show thermal behaviour? Why is there in such interactions a…
We propose a unified space-time picture of baryon stopping and quark-gluon plasma creation in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. It is assumed that the highly Lorentz contracted nuclei are decelerated by the coherent color field which…
We investigate nuclear fragmentation in the central proton-nucleus and nucleus - nucleus collisions at the energies of LHC. We argue that within the semi-classical approximation because of fast increase with energy of cross sections of soft…
To achieve an understanding of the thermalization of a quark-gluon plasma, starting from QCD without using model assumptions, is a formidable task. We study the early stage dynamics of a relativistic heavy ion collision in the framework of…
We calculate production rates for massless $(u,d)$ and massive $(s,c,b)$ quarks in pure glue and quark gluon plasmas to leading order in the strong coupling constant $g$. The leading contribution comes from gluon decay into $q\bar q$ pairs,…
Quarkonium production in high-energy proton (deuteron)-nucleus collisions is investigated in the color glass condensate framework. We employ the color evaporation model assuming that the quark pair produced from dense small-x gluons in the…
When the phase transition from the hadronic matter to the deconfined quark-gluon plasma or quark-gluon liquid is reached, the color degrees of freedom become important and appear explicitly in the equation of state. Under the extreme…