Bjorken Flow, Plasma Instabilities, and Thermalization

Abstract

At asymptotically high energies, thermalization in heavy ion collisions can be described via weak-coupling QCD. We present a complete treatment of how thermalization proceeds, at the parametric weak-coupling level. We show that plasma instabilities dominate the dynamics, from immediately after the collision until well after the plasma becomes nearly in equilibrium. Initially they drive the system close to isotropy, but Bjorken expansion and increasing diluteness makes the system again become more anisotropic. At time τ~ α^(-12/5) Q^(-1) the dynamics become dominated by a nearly-thermal bath; and at time τ~ α^(-5/2) Q^(-1)$ the bath comes to dominate the energy density, completing thermalization. After this time there is a nearly isotropic and thermal Quark-Gluon Plasma.

22 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (7)

• The Color Glass Condensate
• Viscosity Information from Relativistic Nuclear Collisions: How Perfect is the Fluid Observed at RHIC?
• Some Features of the Glasma
• Anomalous Viscosity of an Expanding Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Plasma Instabilities in an Anisotropically Expanding Geometry
• Non-abelian plasma instabilities for strong anisotropy
• Anomalous Transport Processes in Anisotropically Expanding Quark-Gluon Plasmas

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