Thermalization of gluons at RHIC including gg <-> ggg interactions in a parton cascade

Abstract

Employing a newly developed pQCD inspired parton cascade we simulate the space time evolution of gluons which are produced initially in a heavy ion collision at RHIC energy. The inelastic $gg \leftrightarrow ggg$ interactions are for the first time implemented obeying full detailed balance. The numerical results show that thermalization of gluons is mainly driven by the inelastic gluonic interactions and reaches equilibrium at $1\sim 2$ fm/c. In simulations for noncentral collisions considerable partonic elliptic flow $v_2$ is generated being comparable with the experimental data.