Gluon multiplication in high energy heavy ion collisions

Hot gluons are the dominant components of the QCD plasma to be formed in future high energy heavy ion experiments. In this work, the authors study the elementary processes in the plasma medium for gluon multiplication based on all orders of the three-diagrams in perturbative QCD. When applying to the chemical equilibration in the expanding system, they found that the gluons reach chemical equilibrium well within its plasma phase. The inclusion of all the next-to-leading order processes makes the equilibration considerably faster than the simply gg ↔ ggg one considered previously