Visualizing Color Plasma Instabilities
Abstract
I discuss recent advances in the understanding of non-equilibrium gauge field dynamics in plasmas which have particle distributions which are locally anisotropic in momentum space. In contrast to locally isotropic plasmas such anisotropic plasmas have a spectrum of soft unstable modes which are characterized by exponential growth of transverse (chromo)-magnetic fields at short times. The long-time behavior of such instabilities depends on whether or not the gauge group is abelian or non-abelian. I will report on recent numerical simulations which attempt to determine the long-time behavior of an anisotropic non-abelian plasma within hard-loop effective theory. For novelty I will present an interesting method for visualizing the time-dependence of SU(2) gauge field configurations produced during our numerical simulations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0511212,
title = {Visualizing Color Plasma Instabilities},
author = {Michael Strickland},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0511212},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
10 pages, 5 figures. Contribution to Proceedings of Workshop on Quark-Gluon-Plasma Thermalization, Vienna, Austria, Aug 10-12. For full resolution images see http://www.fias.uni-frankfurt.de/home/strickland/instability/