Equilibration within a semiclassical off-shell transport approach

Equilibration times for nuclear matter configurations — modelling intermediate and high energy nucleus–nucleus collisions — are evaluated within the semiclassical off-shell transport approach developed recently. The transport equations are solved for a finite box in coordinate space employing periodic boundary conditions. The off-shell transport model is shown to give proper off-shell equilibrium distributions in the limit t→∞ for the nucleon and Δ-resonance spectral functions. We find that equilibration times within the off-shell approach are only slightly enhanced as compared to the on-shell limit for the momentum configurations considered.