English

Expanding color flux tubes and instabilities

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2008-11-26 v3 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We present an analytic study of the physics of the glasma which is a strong classical gluon field created at early stage of high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Our analysis is based on the picture that the glasma just after the collision is made of color electric and magnetic flux tubes extending in the longitudinal direction with their diameters of the order of 1/Q_s (Q_s is the saturation scale of the colliding nuclei). We find that both the electric and magnetic flux tubes expand outwards and the field strength inside the flux tube decays rapidly in time. Next we investigate whether there exist instabilities against small rapidity-dependent perturbations for a fixed color configuration. We find that the magnetic background field exhibits an instability induced by the fluctuations in the lowest Landau level, and it grows in the time scale of 1/Q_s. For the electric background field we find no apparent instability while the possible relation to the Schwinger mechanism for particle pair creations is suggested.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0803.0410,
  title  = {Expanding color flux tubes and instabilities},
  author = {H. Fujii and K. Itakura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0803.0410},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

29 pages, 5 figures; minor revision, references added

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:18:07.492Z