Thermalization in weakly coupled nonabelian plasmas

By A. Kurkela, Guy D. Moore. 2011

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractWe investigate how relativistic, nonabelian plasmas approach equilibrium in a general context. Our treatment is entirely parametric and for small Yang-Mills coupling α. First we study isotropic systems with an initially nonequilibrium momentum distribution. We consider both the case of initially very high occupancy and initially very low occupancy. Then we consider systems which are anisotropic. We consider both weak anisotropy and large anisotropy, and allow the occupancy to be parametrically large or small. Writing the typical momentum of an initial excitation as Q and the final temperature as Tfinal, full equilibration occurs in a time $ {t_{\text{eq}}} \sim {\alpha^{{ - {2}}}}T_{\text{final}}^{{ - 1}} $ for Tfinal > Q, and $ {t_{\text{eq}}} \sim {\alpha^{{ - 2}}}{Q^{{\frac{1}{2}}}}T_{\text{final}}^{{\frac{{ - 3}}{2}}} $ for Tfinal < Q, unless the initial system is sufficiently anisotropic and $ {T_{\text{final}}} > {\alpha^{{\frac{2}{3}}}}Q $, in which 7 case equilibration occurs somewhat faster, $ {t_{\text{eq}}} \sim \max \left( {{a^{{ - 2}}}{T^{{ - 1}}},\;{\alpha^{{\frac{{ - 13}}{7}}}}{Q^{{\frac{5}{7}}}}T_{\text{final}}^{{\frac{{ - 12}}{7}}}} \right) $.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68a7e8ae53b29ca983ce5a59ba61aaa73ff754b9

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

  1. A. Adams
  2. Lincoln D. Carr
  3. T. Schaefer
  4. John E. Thomas
  5. P. Steinberg
  6. M. Rangamani
  7. Glen Evenbly
  8. Guifré Vidal

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

  1. A. Adams
  2. Lincoln D. Carr
  3. T. Schaefer
  4. John E. Thomas
  5. P. Steinberg
  6. M. Rangamani

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