Heavy quarks at high temperature: can we understand thermalization from first principles?

by Mikko Laine (University of Bielefeld)

Wednesday 23 Sept 2009, 14:00 → 15:30 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

The issue of how fast a strongly interacting system, created in a non-equilibrium process, settles into thermal equilibrium, is of central importance to cosmology and to heavy ion collision experiments. I illustrate some phenomenological and theoretical aspects of the problem by focussing on the behaviour of heavy quarks in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). In this case the ultimate goal would be to determine the thermalization rate from lattice Monte Carlo simulations, and the prospects for this are briefly sketched.