An effective macroscopic description of early-stage chemical equilibration in high-energy heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The early stage of high-energy heavy-ion collisions undergoes transient dynamics, evolving non-perturbatively from a gluon-rich to a chemically equilibrated quark-gluon plasma. We develop an effective hydrodynamic approach that casts the microscopic quark equilibration dynamics as the relaxation evolution of an effective macroscopic bulk viscous pressure. The evolution of this effective bulk viscous pressure captures quark chemical equilibration and the breaking of conformal symmetry, thereby providing a smooth onset of the lattice QCD equation of state after a few fm/$c$ in the hydrodynamic evolution. We investigate phenomenological effects of this macroscopic description on final-state observables in $\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}$, $\mathrm{O}+\mathrm{O}$, and $\mathrm{p}+\mathrm{Pb}$ collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.