Non-Abelian plasma instabilities for extreme anisotropy

Journal Article · Wed Aug 15 00:00:00 EDT 2007 · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVD.76.045009· OSTI ID:21027633

Arnold, Peter; Moore, Guy D ^[1]

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1. Department of Physics, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400714, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4714 (United States)

Thermalization of quark-gluon plasmas in heavy-ion collisions is a difficult theoretical problem. One theoretical goal has been to understand the physics of thermalization in the relatively simplifying limit of arbitrarily high energy collisions, where the running coupling {alpha}{sub s} is weak. One of the current roadblocks to achieving this goal is lack of knowledge about the behavior of plasma instabilities when particle distributions are highly anisotropic. In particular, it has not been known how the magnetic fields generated by plasma instabilities scale with anisotropy. In this paper, we use numerical simulations in a first attempt to determine this scaling.

• OSTI ID: 21027633
• Journal Information: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 76, Issue 4; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.76.045009; (c) 2007 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
ANISOTROPY
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
COUPLING
DISTRIBUTION
HEAVY ION REACTIONS
INSTABILITY
MAGNETIC FIELDS
QUANTUM CHROMODYNAMICS
QUARK MATTER
THERMALIZATION