Thermalization of non-abelian gauge theories at next-to-leading order

Abstract

We provide the first next-to-leading-order (NLO) weak-coupling description of the thermalization process of far-from-equilibrium systems in non-abelian gauge theory. We study isotropic systems starting from either over-or under-occupied initial conditions and follow their time evolution towards thermal equilibrium by numerically solving the QCD effective kinetic theory at NLO accuracy. We find that the NLO corrections remain well under control for a wide range of couplings and that the overall effect of NLO corrections is to reduce the time needed to reach thermal equilibrium in the systems considered.

Investigating the QCD dynamical entropy in high-energy hadronic collisions

“…It is well known that produced particle multiplicities in proton-proton and heavy ion collisions are connected with the entropy produced by these reactions [4][5][6][7][8]. In this context, a current hot topic is the relation between decoherence/entanglement and high-energy quantum chromodynamics (QCD) processes [9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. In general, the analyzes are complex since there are interdisciplinary connections of distinct steps of the thermalization process to non-equilibrium dynamics (see for instance the pedagogical review of Ref.…”