The thermalization of soft modes in non-expanding isotropic quark gluon plasmas

Understand

We discuss the role of elastic and inelastic collisions and their interplay in the thermalization of the quark-gluon plasma.

• We consider a simplified situation of a static plasma, spatially uniform and isotropic in momentum space.
• We focus on the small momentum region, which equilibrates first, and on a short time scale.
• We obtain a simple kinetic equation that allows for an analytic description of the most important regimes.