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Classical Fields and Apparent Thermalization at RHIC

G. W. Carter

We have completed our study of the decay of classical, unstable gluon field configurations called turning points and have discovered a resulting particle energy spectrum similar to that of a a thermalized system [56]. This is a possible explanation of the success of hydrodynamical descriptions of recent RHIC data, as a hydrodynamical model requires the system to reach thermal equilibrium early in the collision. Additional work predicts large quark production in addition to the gluons from the turning points, which would likely lead to experimental signatures that differ from other models of RHIC collisions in which few quarks are produced in the initial state. The properties of the produced quarks and their effects on observables are now being considered.



Martin Savage 2003-08-06