Chiral Relaxation Time at the Crossover of Quantum Chromodynamics

We study microscopic processes responsible for chirality flips in the thermal bath of quantum chromodynamics at finite temperature and zero baryon chemical potential. We focus on the temperature range where the crossover from chirally broken phase to quark-gluon plasma takes place, namely, T similar or equal to (150, 200) MeV. The processes we consider are quark-quark scatterings mediated by collective excitations with the quantum number of pions and sigma meson; hence we refer to these processes simply as one-pion (one-sigma) exchanges. We use a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model to compute equilibrium properties of the thermal bath, as well as the relevant scattering kernel to be used in the collision integral to estimate the chiral relaxation time tau. We find tau similar or equal to 0.1 divided by 1 fm/c around the chiral crossover.