Equilibration of weakly coupled QCD plasmas

We employ a nonequilibrium quantum chromodynamics kinetic description to study the kinetic and chemical equilibration of the quark-gluon plasma at weak coupling. Based on our numerical framework, which explicitly includes all leading order processes involving light flavor degrees of freedom, we investigate the thermalization process of homogeneous and isotropic plasmas far-from equilibrium and determine the relevant timescales for kinetic and chemical equilibration. We further simulate the longitudinally expanding preequilibrium plasma created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at zero and nonzero density of the conserved charges and study its microscopic and macroscopic evolution toward equilibrium.