Thermalization in collisions of large nuclei at high energies

by Eero Aleksi Kurkela (CERN)

Friday 17 Oct 2014, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

Hydrodynamical analysis of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions indicates that the hot QCD matter created in the collisions thermalizes very quickly. Why this is the case remains an open theoretical question.
In this talk I will describe how the thermalization takes place in the most theoretically clean limit — that of large nuclei at asymptotically high energy per nucleon, where the system is described by weak-coupling QCD.
At this limit, the thermalization proceeds via the ``bottom-up’’ mechanism in which the gluons liberated in the collision thermalize by processes resembling jet quenching.