Collision Thermalization of Nucleons in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper proposes a model for nucleon thermalization in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, where momentum transfer randomness leads to partial isotropization and thermalization, enabling analysis of experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel transport-based scheme parametrized by collision count, to study nucleon thermalization without explicit time dependence.

Findings

Model can extract physical information from nucleon rapidity data

Randomization of momentum transfer leads to partial isotropization

Scheme applicable to experimental data analysis

Abstract

We consider a possible mechanism of thermalization of nucleons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Our model belongs, to a certain degree, to the transport ones; we investigate the evolution of the system created in nucleus-nucleus collision, but we parametrize this development by the number of collisions of every particle during evolution rather than by the time variable. We based on the assumption that the nucleon momentum transfer after several nucleon-nucleon (-hadron) elastic and inelastic collisions becomes a random quantity driven by a proper distribution. This randomization results in a smearing of the nucleon momenta about their initial values and, as a consequence, in their partial isotropization and thermalization. The trial evaluation is made in the framework of a toy model. We show that the proposed scheme can be used for extraction of the physical information from experimental data on nucleon rapidity distribution.