Initial temperature and thermalization time in heavy-ion collisions.

Abstract

The problem of thermalization of quarks and gluons in relativistic nuclear collisions is considered in a way that minimizes the explicit dependence on the details of the soft QCD interaction. With nuclear transparency and distributed contraction as essential inputs, it is found that, when the collision energy is asymptotically high, the average initial temperature is in the range 300--500 MeV and the thermalization time has a lower bound of order 0.15 fm/c.