No Arabic abstract
In this work, I calculate the $p_perp$ resolved spectra for the three stages of the textit{bottom-up} scenario, which are comparable to the thermal contribution, particularly at higher values of the saturation scale $Q_S^2$. Analytical solutions are obtained by including a parametrization of scaling solutions from far-from-equilibrium classical statistical lattice simulations into a small angle kinetic rate. Furthermore, a theoretically motivated ansatz is used to account for near-collinear enhancement of the low-$p_perp$ radiation. The system is phenomenologically constrained using the charge hadron multiplicities from LHC and RHIC as in previous parametric estimates and fair agreement with the data available for photons was found. I find that for this realistic set of parameters, the contribution from the thermalizing glasma dominates the excess photons.
A parton produced with a high transverse momentum in a hard collision is regenerating its color field, intensively radiating gluons and losing energy. This process cannot last long, if it ends up with production of a leading hadron carrying the main fraction z_h of the initial parton momentum. So energy conservation imposes severe constraints on the length scale of production of a single hadron with high pT. As a result, the main reason for hadron quenching observed in heavy ion collisions, is not energy loss, but attenuation of the produced colorless dipole in the created dense medium. The latter mechanism, calculated with the path-integral method, explains well the observed suppression of light hadrons and the elliptic flow in a wide range of energies, from the lowest energy of RHIC up to LHC, and in a wide range of transverse momenta. The values of the transport coefficient extracted from data range within 1-2 GeV^2/fm, dependent on energy, and agree well with the theoretical expectations.
In the initial stage of the bottom-up picture of thermalization in heavy ion collisions, the gluon distribution is highly anisotropic which can give rise to plasma instability. This has not been taken account in the original paper. It is shown that in the presence of instability there are scaling solutions, which depend on one parameter, that match smoothly onto the late stage of bottom-up when thermalization takes place.
I review the use of the 2PI effective action in nonequilibrium quantum field theory. The approach enables one to find approximation schemes which circumvent long-standing problems of non-thermal or secular (unbounded) late-time evolutions encountered in standard loop or 1/N expansions of the 1PI effective action. It is shown that late-time thermalization can be described from a numerical solution of the three-loop 2PI effective action for a scalar $phi^4$--theory in 1+1 dimensions (with Jurgen Cox, hep-ph/0006160). Quantitative results far from equilibrium beyond the weak coupling expansion can be obtained from the 1/N expansion of the 2PI effective action at next-to-leading order (NLO), calculated for a scalar O(N) symmetric quantum field theory (hep-ph/0105311). Extending recent calculations in classical field theory by Aarts et al. (hep-ph/0007357) and by Blagoev et al. (hep-ph/0106195) to $N>1$ we show that the NLO approximation converges to exact (MC) results already for moderate values of $N$ (with Gert Aarts, hep-ph/0107129). I comment on characteristic time scales in scalar quantum field theory and the applicability of classical field theory for sufficiently high initial occupation numbers.
We give a simple recipe for computing dissipation and fluctuations (commutator and anti-commutator correlation functions) for non-equilibrium black hole geometries. The recipe formulates Hawking radiation as an initial value problem, and is suitable for numerical work. We show how to package the fluctuation and dissipation near the event horizon into correlators on the stretched horizon. These horizon correlators determine the bulk and boundary field theory correlation functions. In addition, the horizon correlators are the components of a horizon effective action which provides a quantum generalization of the membrane paradigm. In equilibrium, the analysis reproduces previous results on the Brownian motion of a heavy quark. Out of equilibrium, Wigner transforms of commutator and anti-commutator correlation functions obey a fluctuation-dissipation relation at high frequency.
High energy heavy-ion collisions in laboratory produce a form of matter that can test Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, at high temperatures. One of the exciting possibilities is the existence of thermodynamically distinct states of QCD, particularly a phase of de-confined quarks and gluons. An important step in establishing this new state of QCD is to demonstrate that the system has attained thermal equilibrium. We present a test of thermal equilibrium by checking that the mean hadron yields produced in the small impact parameter collisions as well as grand canonical fluctuations of conserved quantities give consistent temperature and baryon chemical potential for the last scattering surface. This consistency for moments up to third order of the net-baryon number, charge, and strangeness is a key step in the proof that the QCD matter produced in heavy-ion collision attains thermal equilibrium. It is a clear indication for the first time, using fluctuation observables, that a femto-scale system attains thermalization. The study also indicates that the relaxation time scales for the system are comparable to or smaller than the life time of the fireball.