Perturbative analysis of parton kinetics for high energy nuclear collisions shows that thermal equilibration of gluons happens very fast, while quark production is much slower. A simple ‘‘minimal model’’ is proposed which includes only incoming quarks and antiquarks. We have found that a smaller quark number is more than compensated by the fact, that they are imbedded into the hotter glue. Predicted yield of dileptons and photons in the interesting kinematic region are larger than considered before, and are quite observable at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the CERN Large Hadron Collider.

• Received 8 January 1993

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.70.2241