Related papers: Bottom-up thermalization in heavy ion collisions
We study first order phase transitions that occur when the temperature of the system increases and we identify the conditions that lead to super-heating, a phase where the system can heat up arbitrarily. First order phase transitions with…
The ultimate aim of high energy heavy ion collisions is to study quark deconfinement and the quark-gluon plasma predicted by quantum chromodynamics. This requires the identification of observables calculable in QCD and measurable in heavy…
We discuss the status of thermal model descriptions of particle ratios in central nucleus-nucleus collisions at ultra-relativistic energy. An alternative to the ``Cleymans-Redlich'' interpretation of the freeze-out trajectory is given in…
Highly excited nuclear matter created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions possibly reaches the phase of quark deconfinement. It quickly cools down and hadronises. We explain that the process of hadronisation may likely be connected…
Relativistic heavy ion physics studies the phenomena that occur when a very large (in units of QCD scale $\Lambda_{\rm QCD}$) amount of energy is deposited into a large (in units of $\Lambda^{-3}_{\rm QCD}$) volume, creating an extended in…
Prethermalization of the equation of state and the kinetic temperature to their equilibrium values occurs on time scales dramatically shorter than the thermal equilibration time. This is a crucial ingredient for the understanding of…
We investigate the impact of quark production on bottom-up thermalization in heavy-ion collisions. First, we extend the parametric estimates of bottom-up thermalization in pure gluon systems by incorporating quark production in the…
The non-equilibrium evolution of heavy-ion collisions is studied in the limit of weak coupling at very high energy employing lattice simulations of the classical Yang-Mills equations. Performing the largest classical-statistical simulations…
The violation of local P and CP invariance in QCD, as it is observed at RHIC, has been a subject of intense discussions for the last couple of years.Separately, a new thermalization scenario for heavy ion collisions through the event…
The origin of the apparent thermalization in high-energy collisions is investigated using the data of the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at the LHC. For this purpose, we analyze the transverse momentum distributions in the following…
We follow the time evolution of nonabelian gauge bosons from far-from-equilibrium initial conditions to thermal equilibrium by numerically solving an effective kinetic equation that becomes accurate in the weak coupling limit. We consider…
A brief review is presented of the status of the thermal model and chemical freeze-out in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Some interewsting aspects at lower energies are emphasized.
We propose a new thermalization scenario for heavy ion collisions which at sufficiently high energies implies the phase transition to the quark--gluon plasma. The key ingredient of our approach is the Hawking--Unruh effect: an observer…
Despite the success of the spin-thermalized assumption in explaining hyperon spin polarizations in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, challenges begin to arise especially at lower collision energies. The present study compares the nucleon…
We argue that multi-particle production in high energy hadron and nuclear collisions can be considered as proceeding through the production of gluons in the background classical field. In this approach we derive the gluon spectrum…
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…
We study thermalization of the early Universe when the inflaton can decay into the Standard Model (SM) quarks and gluons, using QCD arguments. We describe the possible formation of the thermal plasma of soft gluons and quarks well before…
The kinetic energy variation of emitted light clusters has been employed as a clock to explore the time evolution of the temperature for thermalizing composite systems produced in the reactions of 26A, 35A and 47A MeV $^{64}$Zn with…
Starting from a set of coupled Boltzmann equations, we investigate the thermalization of a two-species cold atomic gas confined either in a box or in an isotropic harmonic trap. We show that the thermalization times, by contrast to the…
The current understanding of finite temperature phase transitions in QCD is reviewed. A critical discussion of refined phase transition criteria in numerical lattice simulations and of analytical tools going beyond the mean-field level in…