Instabilities of an anisotropically expanding non-Abelian plasma: 1D+3V discretized hard-loop simulations
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0802.1714,
title = {Instabilities of an anisotropically expanding non-Abelian plasma: 1D+3V discretized hard-loop simulations},
author = {Anton Rebhan and Michael Strickland and Maximilian Attems},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.1714},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
28 pages, 10 figures; v2 minor updates to figures and text; v3 streamlined notation, minor additions to text