Quarks Production in the Quark-Gluon Plasma Created in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates quark production and chemical equilibration in quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy ion collisions, showing that significant quark-antiquark pairs form regardless of initial conditions and coupling strength.

Contribution

It introduces a relativistic transport model with inelastic processes to study quark production, comparing results with different initial conditions and coupling strengths.

Findings

High quark-antiquark pair production regardless of initial conditions

Production rate remains large for realistic coupling strengths

Final system contains a substantial percentage of fermions

Abstract

In this article we report on our results about quark production and chemical equilibration of quark-gluon plasma. Our initial condition corresponds to a classic Yang-Mills spectrum, in which only gluon degrees of freedom are considered; the initial condition is then evolved to a quark-gluon plasma by means of relativistic transport theory with inelastic processes which permit the conversion of gluons to $q\bar{q}$ pairs. We then compare our results to the ones obtained with a standard Glauber model initialization. We find that regardless of the initial condition the final stage of the system contains an abundant percentage of $q\bar{q}$ pairs; moreover spanning the possible coupling from weak to strong we find that unless the coupling is unrealistically small, both production rate and final percentage of fermions is quite large.