Collinear parton splitting in early thermalization and chemical equilibration

Abstract

Early local equilibration of a hot medium created in high-energy heavy ion collisions has been one of the long standing issues in hadron physics. The glasma model predicts that the medium initially has a large amount of high-momentum gluons but few quarks. We develop a phenomenological model based on collinear splitting and recombination of quarks and gluons for a simplified description of thermalization and chemical equilibration. We find that both could be achieved in a short time but chemical equilibration is slower than thermalization.