Thermalization and the chromo-Weibel instability

Abstract

Despite the apparent success of ideal hydrodynamics in describing the elliptic flow data which have been produced at Brookhaven National Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, one lingering question remains: is the use of ideal hydrodynamics at times t < 1 fm/c justified? In order to justify its use a method for rapidly producing isotropic thermal matter at RHIC energies is required. One of the chief obstacles to early isotropization/thermalization is the rapid longitudinal expansion of the matter during the earliest times after the initial nuclear impact. As a result of this expansion the parton distribution functions become locally anisotropic in momentum space. In contrast to locally isotropic plasmas anisotropic plasmas have a spectrum of soft unstable modes which are characterized by exponential growth of transverse chromo-magnetic/-electric fields at short times. This instability is the QCD analogue of the Weibel instability of QED. Parametrically the chromo-Weibel instability provides the fastest method for generation of soft background fields and dominates the short-time dynamics of the system.

8 pages, 4 figures, Invited plenary talk given at the 19th International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions: Quark Matter 2006 (QM 2006), Shanghai, China, 14-20 Nov 2006

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Cited by in corpus (29)

• Causal viscous hydrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions for relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• The First Magnetic Fields
• Pre-equilibrium dilepton production from an anisotropic quark-gluon plasma
• Turbulence in nonabelian gauge theory
• Relativistic anisotropic hydrodynamics
• Instabilities of an anisotropically expanding non-Abelian plasma: 3D+3V discretized hard-loop simulations
• Thermalization and isotropization in heavy-ion collisions
• Matter Wave Turbulence: Beyond Kinetic Scaling
• Constraining relativistic viscous hydrodynamical evolution
• Measuring Quark-Gluon-Plasma Thermalization Time with Dileptons
• Color Instabilities in the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Far-from-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics
• A comparative study of Jet-quenching Schemes
• Shear viscosity $\eta$ to electrical conductivity ${\sigma }_{el}$ ratio for an anisotropic QGP
• Anisotropic hydrodynamic modeling of 200 GeV Au-Au collisions
• Anisotropic Hydrodynamics: Motivation and Methodology
• Chromohydrodynamical instabilities induced by relativistic jets
• The static hard-loop gluon propagator to all orders in anisotropy
• Effective dynamics of a nonabelian plasma out of equilibrium
• Elliptic flow fluctuations in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and the perfect fluid hypothesis
• Early Time Evolution of High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions
• 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
• Dilepton production as a measure of QGP thermalization time
• Jet-dilepton conversion from an anisotropic quark-gluon plasma
• Summary of Experimental Results: Photons, Leptons and Heavy Quarks
• Quantum entanglement in the initial and final state of relativistic heavy ion collisions
• Early dynamics of transversally thermalized matter