We investigate the processes leading to phase-space equilibration of parton distributions in nuclear interactions at collider energies. We derive a set of rate equations describing the chemical equilibration of gluons and quarks including medium effects on the relevant QCD transport coefficients, and discuss their consequences for parton equilibration in heavy ion collisions.

We show that the well-known linear Langevin equation, modeling the Brownian motion and leading to a Gaussian stationary distribution of the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation, is changed by the smallest multiplicative noise. This leads to a power-law tail of the distribution for sufficiently large momenta. At finite ratio of the correlation strength for the multiplicative and the additive noises the stationary energy distribution becomes exactly the Tsallis distribution. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.132302 © 2005 The American Physical Society

Nonextensive thermodynamics is criticized by the statement that the zeroth law cannot be satisfied with nonadditive composition rules. In this paper we determine the general functional form of those nonadditive composition rules that are compatible with the zeroth law of thermodynamics. We find that this general form is additive for the formal logarithms of the original quantities and the familiar relations of thermodynamics apply to these. Our result offers a possible solution to the long-standing questions about equilibrium between extensive and nonextensive systems or systems with different nonextensivity parameters.