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Published on: July 2, 2012
Hard-loop dynamics of non-Abelian plasma instabilities
Anton Rebhan1, Paul Romatschke, Michael Strickland
1Institut für Theoretische Physik, Technische Universität Wien, A-1040 Vienna, Austria.
Abstract:
Non-Abelian plasma instabilities may be responsible for the fast apparent quark-gluon thermalization in relativistic heavy-ion collisions if their exponential growth is not hindered by nonlinearities. We study numerically the real-time evolution of instabilities in an anisotropic non-Abelian plasma with an SU(2) gauge group in the hard-loop approximation. We find exponential growth of non-Abelian plasma instabilities both in the linear and in the strongly nonlinear regimes, with only a brief phase of subexponential behavior in between.
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