Equilibration of the Gluon-Minijet Plasma at RHIC and LHC

We study the production and equilibration of the gluon-minijet plasma expected to be formed in the central region of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at the BNL-RHIC and the CERN-LHC by solving a self-consistent relativistic transport equation. We compute the minijet production within perturbative QCD. Subsequent collisions among the semi-hard partons are treated by considering the elastic $gg \to gg$ processes with screening of the long wavelength modes taken into account. We find rather similar equilibration times at RHIC and LHC energies. However, the number densities, energy densities and temperatures of the minijet plasma are very different. The equilibration times are found to be $\sim5$ fm with temperatures of 360 and 700 MeV at RHIC and LHC, respectively.