Gluon production, cooling and entropy in nuclear collisions

Abstract

We study the cooling (heating) of a glue-parton gas due to production (destruction) of particles and determine the associated production of entropy. We incorporate sharing of the system energy among a changing number of particles. We find that the entropy of an evolving glue-parton gas changes in an insignificant range once the initial high temperature state has been formed, despite a great change in particle number and temperature.

Comments: Replaced for bad printing on US paper. 7 pages, LaTeX, 4 postscript figures