English

Hard-Loop Dynamics of Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-12-04 v3 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

Non-Abelian plasma instabilities may be responsible for the fast apparent quark-gluon thermalization in relativistic heavy-ion collisions if their exponential growth is not hindered by nonlinearities. We study the real-time evolution of instabilities in an anisotropic non-Abelian plasma with an SU(2) gauge group in the hard-loop approximation. We find exponential growth of non-Abelian plasma instabilities both in the linear and in the strongly nonlinear regime, with only a brief phase of subexponential behavior in between.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0412016,
  title  = {Hard-Loop Dynamics of Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities},
  author = {Anton Rebhan and Paul Romatschke and Michael Strickland},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0412016},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages REVTEX4, 3 figures; updated to match version published in Phys. Rev. Lett. (shorter introduction, added details on quality of numerical simulation)

R2 v1 2026-07-22T13:58:58.675Z