Jet-induced gauge field instabilities in the quark-gluon plasma: A kinetic theory approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates gauge field instabilities in a quark-gluon plasma caused by a relativistic jet, using kinetic theory to analyze unstable modes and their potential role in jet quenching in heavy ion collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a kinetic theory framework with a tsunami-like jet distribution to analyze gauge instabilities and compares results with a hydrodynamical approach.

Findings

Unstable modes are most prominent with momentum orthogonal to the jet velocity.

Instabilities occur when jet velocity exceeds a plasma-dependent threshold.

The kinetic and hydrodynamical approaches yield comparable results.

Abstract

We discuss the properties of the collective modes of a system composed by a thermalized quark-gluon plasma traversed by a relativistic jet of partons. The transport equations obeyed by the components of the plasma and of the jet are studied in the Vlasov approximation. Assuming that the partons in the jet can be described with a tsunami-like distribution function we derive the expressions of the dispersion law of the collective modes. Then the behavior of the unstable gauge modes of the system is analyzed for various values of the velocity of the jet, of the momentum of the collective modes and of the angle between these two quantities. We find that the most unstable modes are those with momentum orthogonal to the velocity of the jet and that these instabilities appear when the velocity of the jet is higher than a threshold value, which depends on the plasma and jet frequencies. The results obtained within the Vlasov approximation are compared with the corresponding results obtained using a chromohydrodynamical approach.The effect we discuss here suggests a possible collective mechanism for the description of the jet quenching phenomena in heavy ion collisions.