Review of the "Bottom-Up" scenario

Thermalization of a longitudinally expanding color glass condensate with Bjorken boost invariant geometry is investigated within parton cascade BAMPS. Our main focus lies on the detailed comparison of thermalization, observed in BAMPS with that suggested in the Bottom-Up scenario. We demonstrate that the tremendous production of soft gluons via $gg \to ggg$, which is shown in the Bottom-Up picture as the dominant process during the early preequilibration, will not occur in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies, because the back reaction $ggg\to gg$ hinders the absolute particle multiplication. Moreover, contrary to the Bottom-Up scenario, soft and hard gluons thermalize at the same time. The time scale of thermal equilibration in BAMPS calculations is of order \as^{-2} (\ln \as)^{-2} Q_s^{-1}. After this time the gluon system exhibits nearly hydrodynamic behavior. The shear viscosity to entropy density ratio has a weak dependence on $Q_s$ and lies close to the lower bound of the AdS/CFT conjecture.Comment: Quark Matter 2008 Proceeding

Thermalization of gluon matter including gg<->ggg interactions

Within a pQCD inspired kinetic parton cascade we simulate the space time evolution of gluons which are produced initially in a heavy ion collision at RHIC energy. The inelastic gluonic interactions $gg \leftrightarrow ggg$ do play an important role: For various initial conditions it is found that thermalization and the close to ideal fluid dynamical behaviour sets in at very early times. Special emphasis is put on color glass condensate initial conditions and the `bottom up thermalization' scenario. Off-equilibrium $3\to 2$ processes make up the very beginning of the evolution leading to an initial decrease in gluon number and a temporary avalanche of the gluon momentum distribution to higher transversal momenta.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, Talk given at International Conference on Strong and Electroweak Matter (SEWM 2006), BNL, New York, May 200

Jet quenching and elliptic flow at RHIC and LHC within a pQCD-based partonic transport model

Fully dynamic simulations of heavy ion collisions at RHIC and at LHC energies within the perturbative QCD-based partonic transport model BAMPS (Boltzmann Approach to Multi-Parton Scatterings) are presented, focusing on the simultaneous investigation of jet quenching and elliptic flow. The model features inelastic 2 3 processes based on the Gunion-Bertsch matrix element and has recently been extended to include light quark degrees of freedom, allowing for direct comparison to hadronic data on the nuclear modification factor via a fragmentation scheme for high-pT partons. The nuclear modification factor of neutral pions in central Au+Au collisions at RHIC energy is compared to experimental data. Furthermore first results on the nuclear modification factor and the integrated elliptic flow of charged hadrons in Pb+Pb collisions at LHC are presented and compared to recent ALICE data. These investigations are complemented by a study on the suppression of D-mesons at LHC based on elastic interactions with the medium.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of Quark Matter 201