Eur. Phys. J. A (2006) 29: 59-63
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2005-10299-3

Quark-Gluon-Plasma Thermalization

Visualizing color plasma instabilities

Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, 60438, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

^* e-mail: strickland@fias.uni-frankfurt.de

Received: 17 November 2005
Accepted: 2 January 2006
Published online: 3 August 2006

Abstract

I discuss recent advances in the understanding of non-equilibrium gauge field dynamics in plasmas which have particle distributions which are locally anisotropic in momentum space. In contrast to locally isotropic plasmas such anisotropic plasmas have a spectrum of soft unstable modes which are characterized by exponential growth of transverse (chromo)-magnetic fields at short times. The long-time behavior of such instabilities depends on whether or not the gauge group is Abelian or non-Abelian. I will report on recent numerical simulations which attempt to determine the long-time behavior of an anisotropic non-Abelian plasma within hard-loop effective theory. For novelty I will present an interesting method for visualizing the time dependence of SU(2) gauge field configurations produced during our numerical simulations.