Glasma Evolution and Bose-Einstein Condensation with Elastic and Inelastic Collisions

Xu-Guang Huang, Jinfeng Liao

Published 2013-03-28, updated 2015-11-18Version 4

In this paper we investigate the role of inelastic collisions in the kinetic evolution of a highly overpopulated gluon system starting from Glasma-type initial condition. Using the Gunion-Bertsch formula we derive the inelastic collision kernel under the collinear and small angle approximations. With both numerics and analytic analysis, we show that the inelastic process has two effects: globally changing (mostly reducing) the total particle number, while locally at small momentum regime always filling up the infrared modes extremely quickly. This latter effect is found to significantly speed up the emergence of a local thermal distribution in the infrared regime with vanishing local "chemical potential" and thus catalyze the onset of dynamical Bose-Einstein Condensation to occur faster (as compared with the purely elastic case) in the overpopulated Glasma.