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 paper we study the elementary processes in the plasma medium for gluon multiplication based on all orders of the tree diagrams in perturbative QCD. When applying to the chemical equilibration in the expanding system, we found that the gluon reaches chemical equilibrium well within its plasma phase. The inclusion of all the next-to-leading-order processes makes the equilibration considerably faster than the simple gg <-> ggg one considered previously.