Hard gluon evolution in warming medium

Abstract

We describe the energy distribution of hard gluons travelling through a dense quark-gluon plasma whose temperature increases linearly with time, within a probabilistic perturbative approach. The results were applied to the thermalization problem in heavy ion collisions, in the third stage of the bottom-up picture, to estimate the initial time for the third stage of the bottom-up scenario. We then look at the entropy density and average temperature of the soft thermal bath, as the system approaches (local) thermal equilibrium.

Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures; corrected for updated references and acknowledgements