  The approach of a parton plasma at future heavy ion colliders towards kinetic
and chemical equilibrium is considered. A plasma with a self-consistent
evolving parton-parton interaction strength is shown to equilibrate better and
faster than the usual but inconsistent one with a fixed strength. We explain
why as a consequence of this, a parton plasma is a unique kind of many-body
system. Because our time evolution scheme does not require the plasma to be in
either kind of equilibrium from the outset, out-of-equilibrium effect on
particle productions can be revealed. We show this on photon production and
discuss the implications on photon as a signal to detect the quark-gluon
plasma.
