GLUON MULTIPLICATION IN HIGH-ENERGY HEAVY-ION COLLISIONS

Hot gluons are the dominant components of the QCD plasma to be formed in future high energy heavy ion experiments. In this paper we study th e elementary processes in the plasma medium for gluon multiplication b ased on all orders of the tree diagrams in perturbative QCD. When appl ying to the chemical equilibration in the expanding system, we found t hat the gluon reaches chemical equilibrium well within its plasma phas e. The inclusion of all the next-to-leading-order processes makes the equilibration considerably faster than the simple gg <-> ggg one consi dered previously.