Instabilities of an anisotropically expanding non-Abelian plasma: 1D+3V discretized hard-loop simulations

Feb, 2008
27 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Rev.D 78 (2008) 045023
e-Print:
Report number:
  • TUW-08-05,
  • NSF-KITP-08-01

Citations per year

2008201220162020202402468101214
Abstract: (arXiv)
Non-Abelian plasma instabilities play a crucial role in the nonequilibrium dynamics of a weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma and they importantly modify the standard perturbative bottom-up thermalization scenario in heavy-ion collisions. Using the auxiliary-field formulation of the hard-loop effective theory, we study numerically the real time evolution of instabilities in an anisotropic collisionless Yang-Mills plasma expanding longitudinally in free streaming. In this first real-time lattice simulation we consider the most unstable modes, long-wavelength coherent color fields that are constant in transverse directions and which therefore are effectively 1+1-dimensional in spacetime, except for the auxiliary fields which also depend on discretized momentum rapidity and transverse velocity components. We reproduce the semi-analytical results obtained previously for the Abelian regime and we determine the nonlinear effects which occur when the instabilities have grown such that non-Abelian interactions become important.
  • 11.15.Ha
  • 11.10.Wx
  • 12.38.Mh
  • quark gluon: plasma
  • weak coupling
  • plasma: stability
  • expansion: anisotropy
  • expansion: longitudinal
  • lattice field theory
  • color glass condensate
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