Thermalization of non-abelian gauge theories at next-to-leading order

Abstract

We provide the first next-to-leading-order (NLO) weak-coupling description of the thermalization process of far-from-equilibrium systems in non-abelian gauge theory. We study isotropic systems starting from either over- or under-occupied initial conditions and follow their time evolution towards thermal equilibrium by numerically solving the QCD effective kinetic theory at NLO accuracy. We find that the NLO corrections remain well under control for a wide range of couplings and that the overall effect of NLO corrections is to reduce the time needed to reach thermal equilibrium in the systems considered.