Thermal Masses and Equilibrium Rates in the Quark Gluon Phase

We apply the momentum integrated Boltzmann transport equation to study the time evolution of various quark flavours in the central region of ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. The effects of thermal masses for quarks and gluons are incorporated to take into account the in-medium properties of these ingredients of the putative quark gluon plasma. We find that even under very optimistic conditions, complete chemical equilibration in the quark gluon plasma appears unlikely.