Chemical Evolution of Strongly Interacting Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

At very initial stage of relativistic heavy ion collisions a wave of quark-gluon matter is produced from the break-up of the strong color electric field and then thermalizes at a short time scale (~1 fm/c). However, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) system is far out of chemical equilibrium, especially for the heavy quarks which are supposed to reach chemical equilibrium much late. In this paper a continuing quark production picture for strongly interacting QGP system is derived, using the quark number susceptibilities and the equation of state; both of them are from the results calculated by the Wuppertal-Budapest lattice QCD collaboration. We find that the densities of light quarks increase by 75% from the temperatureT=400 MeV toT=150 MeV, while the density of strange quark annihilates by 18% in the temperature region. We also offer a discussion on how this late production of quarks affects the final charge-charge correlations.