Thermalization and plasma instabilities

Abstract

I review recent analytical and numerical advances in the study of non-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma physics. I concentrate on studies of the dynamics of plasmas 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. Parametrically the instabilities provide the fastest method for generation of soft background fields and dominate the short-time dynamics of the system.

8 pages, 3 figures; Contribution to the proceedings of the International Conference on Strong & Electroweak Matter 2006, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, May 2006

References in corpus (20)

• Bottom-up thermalization in heavy ion collisions
• Collective Modes of an Anisotropic Quark-Gluon Plasma
• The Quark-Gluon Plasma: Collective Dynamics and Hard Thermal Loops
• QCD Plasma Instabilities and Bottom-Up Thermalization
• Collective modes of an Anisotropic Quark-Gluon Plasma II
• Collective non-Abelian instabilities in a melting Color Glass Condensate
• Classical Transport Theory and Hard Thermal Loops in the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Dynamics of Quark-Gluon-Plasma Instabilities in Discretized Hard-Loop Approximation
• The Fate of Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities in 3+1 Dimensions
• Hard-Loop Effective Action for Anisotropic Plasmas
• QCD Plasma Instabilities: The Nonabelian Cascade
• Deriving the Hard Thermal Loops of QCD from Classical Transport Theory
• A Boltzmann Equation for the QCD Plasma
• The turbulent spectrum created by non-Abelian plasma instabilities
• Color filamentation in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions
• QCD Plasma Instabilities and Isotropization
• Collisional Energy Loss of a Heavy Quark in an Anisotropic Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Energy Loss of a Heavy Fermion in an Anisotropic QED Plasma
• QCD in Nuclear Collisions
• A remark on non-Abelian classical kinetic theory

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Jet quenching and broadening: the transport coefficient $\hat{q}$ in an anisotropic plasma
• Modified Kolmogorov Wave Turbulence in QCD matched onto "Bottom-up" Thermalization
• Photons from thermalizing matter in heavy ion collisions
• Fluctuations driven isotropization of the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions