Two problems concerning hot hadronic matter and high energy collisions (Equilibrium formation, plasma deflagration)

Abstract

This paper addresses two questions concerning the hydrodynamical approach to high energy collisions producing large multiplicities of hadrons. The first one concerns the difficulty of understanding in terms of successive parton interactions the formation of local thermal equilibrium for the small and short-lived blobs of excited hadronic matter created in such collisions. We argue that the number of successive parton interactions is not the only relevant factor for equilibrium formation, another factor being the early randomization present in all experiments which observe a subsystem of the complete final state and average over many unobserved degrees of freedom. This conjecture helps to understand the high degree of universality of hadronic jets and the fact that quite different dynamical models manage to describe the same data. The second problem concerns the hadronization of a blob of quark-gluon plasma as could be produced in a very high energy collision. Assuming the transition of plasma to hadron gas to have high latent heat, we show for small chemical potential that the plasma can deflagrate and convert a fraction of its latent heat into collective flow of the hadron gas. In such deflagrations very little entropy is produced, but the flow velocity of the hadron gas with respect to the plasma can be more than half of the velocity of light.