Lessons from Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities in Two Spatial Dimensions

Abstract

Plasma instabilities can play a fundamental role in quark-gluon plasma equilibration in the high energy (weak coupling) limit. Early simulations of the evolution of plasma instabilities in non-abelian gauge theory, performed in one spatial dimension, found behavior qualitatively similar to traditional QED plasmas. Later simulations of the fully three-dimensional theory found different behavior, unlike traditional QED plasmas. To shed light on the origin of this difference, we study the intermediate case of two spatial dimensions. Depending on how the "two-dimensional'' theory is formulated, we can obtain either behavior.

15 pages, 10 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Instabilities of an anisotropically expanding non-Abelian plasma: 1D+3V discretized hard-loop simulations
• Non-abelian plasma instabilities for strong anisotropy
• Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities for Extreme Anisotropy
• Highly occupied gauge theories in 2+1 dimensions: self-similar attractor
• Modified Kolmogorov Wave Turbulence in QCD matched onto "Bottom-up" Thermalization
• Photons from thermalizing matter in heavy ion collisions
• A non-perturbative study of the evolution of cosmic magnetised sources