Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities for Extreme Anisotropy

TL;DR

This paper investigates how magnetic fields generated by plasma instabilities scale with anisotropy in highly anisotropic quark-gluon plasmas using numerical simulations, advancing understanding of thermalization in extreme conditions.

Contribution

It provides the first numerical analysis of the scaling behavior of plasma instability magnetic fields in highly anisotropic regimes.

Findings

Magnetic field growth depends on the degree of anisotropy.

Numerical results suggest specific scaling laws for magnetic fields.

Insights gained could inform models of plasma thermalization.

Abstract

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_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.