Decoherence time in high energy heavy ion collisions

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We calculate the decoherence time of the ground state wave function of a nucleus in a high energy heavy ion collision. We define this time as the decay time of the ratio Tr0.3em0exD²/(Tr0.3em0exD)² of traces of the density matrix D. We find that this time is smaller or equal to 1/Qₛ, where the saturation scale Qₛ is defined within the color glass condensate model of parton saturation. Our result supports the notion that the extremely rapid entropy production deduced for the early stage of heavy ion collisions at collider energies is to a large extent caused by the decoherence of the initial-state wave functions.