Equilibration of the Gluon-Minijet Plasma at RHIC and LHC

Abstract

We study the production and equilibration of the gluon-minijet plasma expected to be formed in the central region of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at the BNL-RHIC and the CERN-LHC by solving a self-consistent relativistic transport equation. We compute the minijet production within perturbative QCD. Subsequent collisions among the semi-hard partons are treated by considering the elastic gg -> gg processes with screening of the long wavelength modes taken into account. We determine the time ${\tau }_{eq}$ where close to ideal hydrodynamic flow sets in, and find rather similar numbers for central heavy-ion collisions at BNL-RHIC and CERN-LHC energies. The number densities, energy densities and temperatures of the minijet plasma are found to be different at RHIC and LHC, e.g. $T({\tau }_{eq})\sim 220$ MeV and 380 MeV, respectively.

Comments: 14 Pages latex (single spaced), 7 postscript figures, Version to be published