The unstable glasma

By Paul Romatschke, R. Venugopalan. 2006

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss results from 3+1-D numerical simulations of SU(2) Yang-Mills equations for an unstable glasma expanding into the vacuum after a high energy heavy-ion collision. We expand on our earlier work on a non-Abelian Weibel instability in such a system and study the behavior of the instability in greater detail on significantly larger lattices than previously. We establish the time scale for the onset of the instability and demonstrate that the growth rate is robust as one approaches the continuum limit. For large violations of boost invariance, non-Abelian effects cause the growth of soft modes to saturate. At late times, we observe significant creation of longitudinal pressure and a systematic trend towards isotropy. These time scales however are significantly larger than those required for early thermalization in heavy-ion collisions. We discuss additional effects in the produced glasma that may speed up thermalization.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3c6cedbe169fd71944f16ce99093c63304c8e27

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Ulrike Romatschke
2. B. Schenke
3. Paul Romatschke
4. P. Kovtun
5. M. Rangamani
6. A. Jaiswal
7. V. Roy
8. V. Hubeny

Citations in the corpus

• Collective Phenomena in the Non-Equilibrium Quark-Gluon Plasma (2008, background): “Unstable parton systems under conditions close to those realized in heavy-ion collisions have recently been studied in [165, 166, 167].”
• Momentum broadening in an anisotropic plasma (2006, background): “Plasma instabilities may help speeding up the equilibration process by rapidly isotropizing the system [4, 5, 6, 7, 8], probably by some cascade to the UV [9, 10, 11, 12, 13], although they might still be too slow to overcome the initially strong longitudinal expansion rate [14].”
• Relativistic Fluid Dynamics in and out of Equilibrium (2017, background): “Re-introducing rapidity-fluctuations (which are expected to be sourced by quantum corrections or nuclei of finite width) qualitatively changes the behavior of the solutions because of the presence of plasma instabilities [259–263].”