arXiv · hep-ph/9305227
Thermal quark production in pure glue and quark gluon plasmas
Abstract
We calculate production rates for massless $(u,d)$ and massive $(s,c,b)$ quarks in pure glue and quark gluon plasmas to leading order in the strong coupling constant $g$. The leading contribution comes from gluon decay into $q\bar q$ pairs, using a thermal gluon propagator with finite thermal mass and damping rate. The rate behaves as $α_S^2(\ln 1/α_S)^2 T^4$ when $m, α_S \rightarrow 0$ and depends linearly on the transverse gluon damping rate for all values of the quark mass $m$. The light quark ($u$, $d$, $s$) chemical equilibration time is approximately 10-100 $T^{-1}$ for $g=$2-3, so that quarks are likely to remain far from chemical equilibrium in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions.
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Tanguy Altherr, David Seibert. 1993-05-07. Thermal quark production in pure glue and quark gluon plasmas. https://doi.org/10.1016/0370-2693(93)91204-z
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