Early thermalization of quark-gluon matter by elastic 3-to-3 scattering

Abstract

The early thermalization is crucial to the quark-gluon plasma as a perfect liquid and results from many-body scattering. We calculate squared amplitudes for elastic parton-parton-parton scattering in perturbative QCD. Transport equations with the squared amplitudes are established and solved to obtain the thermalization time of initially produced quark-gluon matter and the initial temperature of quark-gluon plasma. We find that the thermalization times of quark matter and gluon matter are different.

Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure, proceedings for Extreme QCD 2012