Thermalization at RHIC
- 1 January 2004
- proceedings article
- Published by AIP Publishing in AIP Conference Proceedings
- Vol. 739 (1) , 163-180
- https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1843595
Abstract
Ideal hydroynamics provides an excellent description of all aspects of the single‐particle spectra of all hadrons with transverse momenta below about 1.5‐2 GeV/c at RHIC. This is shown to require rapid local thermalization at a time scale below 1 fm/c and at energy densities which exceed the critical value for color deconfinement by an order of magnitude. The only known thermalized state at such energy densities is the quark‐gluon plasma (QGP). The rapid thermalization indicates that the QGP is a strongly interacting liquid rather than the weakly interacting gas of quarks and gluons that was previously expected.Keywords
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