skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Color instabilities in the quark–gluon plasma

Abstract

When the quark–gluon plasma (QGP) – a system of deconfined quarks and gluons – is in a nonequilibrium state, it is usually unstable with respect to color collective modes. The instabilities, which are expected to strongly influence dynamics of the QGP produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, are extensively discussed under the assumption that the plasma is weakly coupled. Here, we begin by presenting the theoretical approaches to study the QGP, which include: field theory methods based on the Keldysh–Schwinger formalism, classical and quantum kinetic theories, and fluid techniques. The dispersion equations, which give the spectrum of plasma collective excitations, are analyzed in detail. We pay particular attention to a momentum distribution of plasma constituents which is obtained by deforming an isotropic momentum distribution. Mechanisms of chromoelectric and chromomagnetic instabilities are explained in terms of elementary physics. The Nyquist analysis, which allows one to determine the number of solutions of a dispersion equation without explicitly solving it, and stability criteria are also discussed. We then review various numerical approaches – purely classical or quantum – to simulate the temporal evolution of an unstable quark–gluon plasma. The dynamical role of instabilities in the processes of plasma equilibration is analyzed.

Authors:
 [1];  [2];  [3]
  1. Jan Kochanowski Univ., Kielce (Poland). Inst. of Physics; National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw (Poland)
  2. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States). Physics Dept.
  3. Goethe Univ., Frankfurt (Germany). Franfurt Inst. for Advanced Studies
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
OSTI Identifier:
1392244
Alternate Identifier(s):
OSTI ID: 1397939
Report Number(s):
BNL-114267-2017-JA
Journal ID: ISSN 0370-1573
Grant/Contract Number:  
SC0012704; SC0013470
Resource Type:
Journal Article: Accepted Manuscript
Journal Name:
Physics Reports
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Volume: 682; Journal Issue: C; Journal ID: ISSN 0370-1573
Publisher:
Elsevier
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS

Citation Formats

Mrówczyński, Stanisław, Schenke, Björn, and Strickland, Michael. Color instabilities in the quark–gluon plasma. United States: N. p., 2017. Web. doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2017.03.003.
Mrówczyński, Stanisław, Schenke, Björn, & Strickland, Michael. Color instabilities in the quark–gluon plasma. United States. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2017.03.003
Mrówczyński, Stanisław, Schenke, Björn, and Strickland, Michael. 2017. "Color instabilities in the quark–gluon plasma". United States. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2017.03.003. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1392244.
@article{osti_1392244,
title = {Color instabilities in the quark–gluon plasma},
author = {Mrówczyński, Stanisław and Schenke, Björn and Strickland, Michael},
abstractNote = {When the quark–gluon plasma (QGP) – a system of deconfined quarks and gluons – is in a nonequilibrium state, it is usually unstable with respect to color collective modes. The instabilities, which are expected to strongly influence dynamics of the QGP produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, are extensively discussed under the assumption that the plasma is weakly coupled. Here, we begin by presenting the theoretical approaches to study the QGP, which include: field theory methods based on the Keldysh–Schwinger formalism, classical and quantum kinetic theories, and fluid techniques. The dispersion equations, which give the spectrum of plasma collective excitations, are analyzed in detail. We pay particular attention to a momentum distribution of plasma constituents which is obtained by deforming an isotropic momentum distribution. Mechanisms of chromoelectric and chromomagnetic instabilities are explained in terms of elementary physics. The Nyquist analysis, which allows one to determine the number of solutions of a dispersion equation without explicitly solving it, and stability criteria are also discussed. We then review various numerical approaches – purely classical or quantum – to simulate the temporal evolution of an unstable quark–gluon plasma. The dynamical role of instabilities in the processes of plasma equilibration is analyzed.},
doi = {10.1016/j.physrep.2017.03.003},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1392244}, journal = {Physics Reports},
issn = {0370-1573},
number = C,
volume = 682,
place = {United States},
year = {Sun Apr 09 00:00:00 EDT 2017},
month = {Sun Apr 09 00:00:00 EDT 2017}
}

Journal Article:

Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 30 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

Save / Share:

Works referenced in this record:

Sphaleron transitions and baryon asymmetry: A numerical, real-time analysis
journal, April 1991


QCD plasma instabilities and bottom-up thermalization
journal, August 2003


Effective kinetic theory for high temperature gauge theories
journal, January 2003


Anomalous Viscosity of an Expanding Quark-Gluon Plasma
journal, June 2006


Anomalous Transport Processes in Anisotropically Expanding Quark-Gluon Plasmas
journal, October 2006


“Bottom-up” thermalization in heavy ion collisions
journal, March 2001


Operator expansion for high-energy scattering
journal, March 1996


Yang-Mills Magnetofluid Unification
journal, August 2006


Lattice gauge description of colliding nuclei
journal, October 1999


Thermal equilibration in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions
journal, April 1984


Basin of attraction for turbulent thermalization and the range of validity of classical-statistical simulations
journal, May 2014


Universality Far from Equilibrium: From Superfluid Bose Gases to Heavy-Ion Collisions
journal, February 2015


Simulating plasma instabilities in <mml:math altimg="si1.gif" overflow="scroll" xmlns:xocs="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/xocs/dtd" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/ja/dtd" xmlns:ja="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/ja/dtd" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:tb="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/common/table/dtd" xmlns:sb="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/common/struct-bib/dtd" xmlns:ce="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/common/dtd" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:cals="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/common/cals/dtd"><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">SU</mml:mi><mml:mo stretchy="false">(</mml:mo><mml:mn>3</mml:mn><mml:mo stretchy="false">)</mml:mo></mml:math> gauge theory
journal, June 2009


Kinetic equations for long-wavelength excitations of the quark-gluon plasma
journal, May 1993


Soft collective excitations in hot gauge theories
journal, April 1994


A Boltzmann equation for the QCD plasma
journal, September 1999


The quark–gluon plasma: collective dynamics and hard thermal loops
journal, March 2002


The impact of QCD plasma instabilities on bottom-up thermalization
journal, October 2005


Non-abelian plasma instabilities for strong anisotropy
journal, July 2007


Horizon Formation and Far-from-Equilibrium Isotropization in a Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Plasma
journal, May 2009


Complete Plasmon Spectrum of Two-stream System
journal, January 2015


The heavy-quark potential in an anisotropic plasma
journal, April 2008


QCD plasma instabilities and isotropization
journal, August 2005


Numerical simulation of non-Abelian particle-field dynamics
journal, July 2006


Role of quantum fluctuations in a system with strong fields: Onset of hydrodynamical flow
journal, January 2011


Transport equations for the QCD gluon Wigner operator
journal, September 1986


Transport equations for the QCD quark Wigner operator
journal, October 1986


Quark-Gluon transport theory
journal, November 1989


Role of quantum fluctuations in a system with strong fields: Spectral properties and thermalization
journal, December 2011


Pressure Isotropization in High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions
journal, December 2013


Nonlinear gluon evolution in the color glass condensate: II
journal, May 2002


The evolving Glasma
journal, January 2012


Initial singularity of the little bang
journal, April 2007


Hydrodynamic Modeling of Heavy-Ion Collisions
journal, April 2013


Color Glass Condensate and Glasma
journal, January 2013


The Color Glass Condensate
journal, November 2010


Glittering Glasmas
journal, September 2009


Kinetic Theory for Plasmas with Non-Abelian Interactions
journal, August 1983


Quark-gluon transport theory I. The classical theory
journal, April 1985


Thermalization at RHIC
conference, January 2004

  • Heinz, Ulrich
  • IX HADRON PHYSICS AND VII RELATIVISTIC ASPECTS OF NUCLEAR PHYSICS: A Joint Meeting on QCD and QCP, AIP Conference Proceedings
  • https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1843595

Collective Flow and Viscosity in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions
journal, October 2013


Characteristics of Thermalization of Boost-Invariant Plasma from Holography
journal, May 2012


Relativistic chromohydrodynamics and Yang-Mills Vlasov plasma
journal, October 1984


Classical lattice gauge fields with hard thermal loops
journal, September 1997


Nonlinear gluon evolution in the color glass condensate: I
journal, September 2001


The BFKL equation from the Wilson renormalization group
journal, October 1997


Plasmons in Classical Non-Abelian Gauge Theories
journal, January 1980


Deriving the hard thermal loops of QCD from classical transport theory
journal, May 1994


QCD plasma parameters and the gauge-dependent gluon propagator
journal, June 1990


Gauge dependence identities and their application at finite temperature
journal, May 1991


Classical initial conditions for ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions
journal, September 2001


Advances in perturbative thermal field theory
journal, February 2004


Coherent Gluon Production in Very-High-Energy Heavy-Ion Collisions
journal, October 2001


Classical gluodynamics of high energy nuclear collisions: an erratum and an update
journal, November 2003


Elliptic flow of colored glass in high energy heavy ion collisions
journal, February 2003


Gluon production in the Color Glass Condensate model of collisions of ultrarelativistic finite nuclei
journal, April 2003


Non-perturbative computation of gluon mini-jet production in nuclear collisions at very high energies
journal, September 1999


Initial Energy Density of Gluons Produced in Very-High-Energy Nuclear Collisions
journal, May 2000


Approach to Equilibrium in Weakly Coupled Non-Abelian Plasmas
journal, October 2014


Bjorken flow, plasma instabilities, and thermalization
journal, November 2011


Thermalization in weakly coupled nonabelian plasmas
journal, December 2011


Some features of the glasma
journal, June 2006


Spectrum of quark-gluon plasma
journal, September 1990


Semi-classical transport theory for non-Abelian plasmas
journal, July 2002


Measuring Quark-Gluon-Plasma Thermalization Time with Dileptons
journal, March 2008


Dissipative dynamics of highly anisotropic systems
journal, December 2010


Chromohydrodynamics of the quark plasma
journal, March 1988


Color filamentation in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions
journal, February 1997


Towards Relativistic Transport-Theory of Nuclear Matter
journal, January 1994


What Do Electromagnetic Plasmas Tell Us about the Quark-Gluon Plasma?
journal, November 2007


A possible modified “bottom-up” thermalization in heavy ion collisions
journal, January 2006


Isotropization by QCD Plasma Instabilities
journal, August 2006


Dynamics of quark-gluon-plasma instabilities in discretized hard-loop approximation
journal, September 2005


Hard-Loop Dynamics of Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities
journal, March 2005


Plasma Instabilities in an Anisotropically Expanding Geometry
journal, December 2006


Collective Non-Abelian Instabilities in a Melting Color Glass Condensate
journal, February 2006


Brownian Motion of a Quantum Oscillator
journal, May 1961


Collision terms for a quark-gluon plasma of Lenard-Balescu type
journal, October 1991


Physics of strongly coupled quark–gluon plasma
journal, January 2009


Viscosity, Black Holes, and Quantum Field Theory
journal, November 2007


Thermalization and the chromo-Weibel instability
journal, July 2007


Anisotropic hydrodynamics: Motivation and methodology
journal, June 2014


Thermalization and isotropization in heavy-ion collisions
journal, May 2015


Thermal bottomonium suppression at RHIC and LHC
journal, April 2012


Works referencing / citing this record:

Effective coupling constant of plasmons
journal, September 2019


Effective Coupling Constant of Plasmons
text, January 2019


Dissipative type theories for Bjorken and Gubser flows
preprint, January 2019