Thermalization of mini-jets in a quark-gluon plasma

Understand

We complete the physical picture for the evolution of a high-energy jet propagating through a weakly-coupled quark-gluon plasma by investigating the thermalization of the soft components of the jet.

• We argue that the following scenario should hold: the leading particle emits a significant number of mini-jets which promptly evolve via quasi-democratic branchings and thus degrade into a myriad of soft gluons, with energies of the order of the medium temperature T.
• Via elastic collisions with the medium constituents, these soft gluons relax to local thermal equilibrium with the plasma over a time scale which is considerably shorter than the typical lifetime of the mini-jet.
• The thermalized gluons form a tail which lags behind the hard components of the jet.