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PARTICLE MULTIPLICITIES AND THERMALIZATION IN HIGH ENERGY COLLISIONS

JAMES HORMUZDIAR

Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 University Street, Montréal, Québec, H3A 2T8, Canada

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STEPHEN D. H. HSU

Department of Physics, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-5203, USA

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, and

GREGORY MAHLON

Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 University Street, Montréal, Québec, H3A 2T8, Canada

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218301303001478Cited by:16 (Source: Crossref)

Abstract

We investigate the conditions under which particle multiplicities in high energy collisions are Boltzmann distributed, as is the case for hadron production in e⁺e^-, pp, and heavy ion collisions. We show that the apparent temperature governing this distribution does not necessarily imply equilibrium (thermal or chemical) in the usual sense. We discuss an explicit example using tree level amplitudes for N photon production in which a Boltzmann-like distribution is obtained without any equilibration. We argue that the failure of statistical techniques based on free particle ensembles may provide a signal for collective phenomena (such as large shifts in masses and widths of resonances) related to the QCD phase transition.

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