Nonequilibrium dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). We have developed field theory and numerical methods for the general problem of quantum back reaction on classical fields, with applications to a wide variety of physical systems. Our main focus was on particle production processes in the time evolution of the quark-gluon plasma following an ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collision. In particular, we studied in some detail the evolution of a disoriented chiral condensate (DCC) produced in the chiral phase transition of nuclear matter in heavy-ion collision experiments. We have also studied dissipation and decoherence as a result of particle production in time-varying mean fields. Numerical codes previously developed for particle production in strong electric fields in quantum electrodynamics (QED) have been modified for the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) problem. We have made specific predictions for energy-momentum flow and pion production in the central rapidity region of experiments to be performed at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC)