Dynamical equilibration of strongly interacting "infinite" parton matter within the parton-hadron-string dynamics transport approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates how strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma reaches equilibrium using a transport approach that incorporates lattice QCD results, analyzing particle distributions, spectral functions, and fluctuations in a simulated infinite system.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed study of kinetic and chemical equilibration in infinite parton matter using the off-shell transport approach aligned with lattice QCD data, including fluctuation analysis.

Findings

Transport calculations match DQPM for quarks and antiquarks.

Gluon spectral functions differ slightly due to interactions.

Fluctuation relaxation times are shorter than average value relaxation times.

Abstract

We study the kinetic and chemical equilibration in "infinite" parton matter within the parton-hadron-string dynamics off-shell transport approach, which is based on a dynamical quasiparticle model (DQPM) for partons matched to reproduce lattice QCD results-including the partonic equation of state-in thermodynamic equilibrium. The "infinite" parton matter is simulated by a system of quarks and gluons within a cubic box with periodic boundary conditions, at different energy densities, initialized slightly out of kinetic and chemical equilibrium. We investigate the approach of the system to equilibrium and the time scales for the equilibration of different observables. We, furthermore, study particle distributions in the strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma (sQGP) including partonic spectral functions, momentum distributions, abundances of the different parton species and their fluctuations (scaled variance, skewness, and kurtosis) in equilibrium. We also compare the results of the microscopic calculations with the ansatz of the DQPM. It is found that the results of the transport calculations are in equilibrium well matched by the DQPM for quarks and antiquarks, while the gluon spectral function shows a slightly different shape due to the explicit interaction of partons. The time scales for the relaxation of fluctuation observables are found to be shorter than those for the average values. Furthermore, in the local subsystem, a strong change of the fluctuation observables with the size of the local volume is observed. These fluctuations no longer correspond to those of the full system and are reduced to Poissonian distributions when the volume of the local subsystem becomes much smaller than the total volume.