  Prescaling is a far-from-equilibrium phenomenon which describes the rapid
establishment of a universal scaling form of distributions much before the
universal values of their scaling exponents are realized. We consider the
example of the spatio-temporal evolution of the quark-gluon plasma explored in
heavy-ion collisions at sufficiently high energies. Solving QCD kinetic theory
with elastic and inelastic processes, we demonstrate that the gluon and quark
distributions very quickly adapt a self-similar scaling form, which is
independent of initial condition details and system parameters. The dynamics in
the prescaling regime is then fully encoded in a few time-dependent scaling
exponents, whose slow evolution gives rise to far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamic
behavior.
