Nonequilibrium quark production in the expanding QCD plasma

Abstract

We present real-time lattice simulation results for nonequilibrium quark production from an over-occupied gluon plasma in longitudinally expanding geometry. The quark number density per unit transverse area and rapidity shows almost linear growth in time, and its growth rate appears to be consistent with a simple kinetic theory estimate involving only two-to-two scattering processes in small-angle approximation. We also find that quarks produced at early times satisfy a nonequilibrium scaling law.