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We study the propagation of charm quarks, produced from the initial fusion of partons, in an equilibrating quark-gluon plasma which may be formed in the wake of relativistic collisions of gold nuclei. Initial conditions are taken from a self screened parton cascade model and the chemical equilibration is assumed to proceed via gluon multiplication and quark production. The energy loss suffered by the charm quarks is obtained by evaluating the drag force generated by the scattering with quarks and gluons in the medium. We find that the charm quarks may loose only about 10% of their initial energy in conditions likely to be attained at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, while they may loose up to 40% of their energy while propagating in the plasma created at Large Hadron Collider. We discuss the implications for signals of quark gluon plasma.

We evaluate the strangeness production from equilibrating and transversely expanding quark-gluon plasma which may be created in the wake of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We consider boost-invariant longitudinal and cylindrically symmetric transverse expansion of a gluon-dominated partonic plasma, which is in local thermal equilibrium. Initial conditions obtained from the self-screened parton cascade model are used. We empirically find that the final extent of the partonic equilibration rises almost linearly with the square of the initial energy density. This along with the corresponding variation with the number of participants may help us distinguish between various models of parton production.

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