Related papers: Unstable Quark-Gluon Plasma at LHC
Topical phenomena in high-energy physics related to collision experiments of heavy nuclei ("Little Bang") and early universe cosmology ("Big Bang") involve far-from-equilibrium dynamics described by quantum field theory. One example…
We discuss possible experimental signatures of forming a Quark-Gluon plasma in high energy nuclear collisions. In first order phase transitions such as the chiral symmetry restoration supercooling may lead to density fluctuations such as…
We study the evolution of the quark-gluon composition of the plasma created in ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions (uRHIC's) employing a partonic transport theory that includes both elastic and inelastic collisions plus a mean fields…
We argue that an expanding quark-gluon plasma has an anomalous viscosity, which arises from interactions with dynamically generated colour fields. The anomalous viscosity dominates over the collisional viscosity for large velocity gradients…
A strongly interacting Quark-Gluon Plasma (sQGP) is created in the high energy heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC. Our present understanding of sQGP as a very good liquid with astonishingly low viscosity is reviewed. With the arrival of…
Magnetic plasma instabilities appear to play an important role in the early stages of quark-gluon plasma equilibration in the high energy (weak coupling) limit. Numerical studies of the growth of such instabilities from small seed…
I review our current understanding of the processes driving the thermalization and isotropization of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) created in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions (URHICs). I begin by discussing the phenomenological…
We discuss a number of prominent theoretical challenges in the physics of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions, and review some recent attempts to tackle them. These examples cover most stages of the collision process, but emphasis is…
We investigate the chemical equilibration of the parton distributions in collisions of two heavy nuclei, assuming the partonic fluid to be ideal as well as viscous. The initial conditions are taken from HIJING calculations for Au+Au…
QCD plasma instabilities appear to play an important role in the equilibration of quark-gluon plasmas in heavy-ion collisions in the theoretical limit of weak coupling (i.e. asymptotically high energy). It is important to understand what…
Under suitable non-equilibrium conditions QCD plasma can develop plasma instabilities, where some modes of the plasma grow exponentially. It has been argued that these instabilities can play a significant role in the thermalisation of the…
We study the kinetic equilibration of gluons produced in the very early stages of a high energy heavy ion collision in a ``self-consistent'' relaxation time approximation. We compare two scenarios describing the initial state of the gluon…
The relativistic Fokker Planck equation has been used to study the evolution of the quark distribution in the quark gluon phase expected to be formed in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. The effect of thermal masses for quarks and…
The small surface tension of the interface between hadronic and quark-gluon-plasma domains, along with a negative curvature tension, implies that the uniform plasma is unstable against spontaneous formation of hadronic bubbles. We…
We investigate the onset of wave-breaking in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) formed in heavy-ion collisions at both RHIC and the LHC. A nonlinear longitudinal color field is coupled to a three-dimensional viscous hydrodynamic background…
Magnetic fields of a large intensity can be generated in peripheral high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Although their intensity drops fast and, moreover, it is not clear whether these fields last long enough to induce a magnetization during…
A proper description of the non-equilibrium matter preceding the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in heavy-ion collisions and its observable consequences remain a major theoretical challenge, while at the same time offering new opportunities for…
A framework combining Yang-Mills dynamics of the pre-equilibrium glasma with relativistic viscous hydrodynamic evolution of the quark-gluon plasma and hadron gas phases is presented. Event-by-event fluctuations of nucleon positions and…
High-energy nuclear collisions encompass three key stages: the structure of the colliding nuclei informed by low-energy nuclear physics, the initial condition (IC) leading to the formation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP), and the hydrodynamic…
Non-equilibrium features of a first order phase transition from the quark-gluon plasma to a hadronic gas in relativistic heavy-ion collisions are discussed. It is demonstrated that strong collective expansion may lead to the fragmentation…