Jet broadening in unstable non-Abelian plasmas

TL;DR

This paper uses numerical simulations of the QCD Boltzmann-Vlasov equation to study jet broadening in unstable non-Abelian plasmas, revealing anisotropic effects and unstable field modes that influence jet behavior.

Contribution

It provides a novel estimate of jet coupling to hot plasma independent of infrared cutoffs and explores anisotropic plasma instabilities affecting jet broadening.

Findings

Unstable modes develop in anisotropic plasmas.

Jets experience greater broadening in rapidity than azimuth.

The study offers insights into experimental jet observations.

Abstract

We perform numerical simulations of the QCD Boltzmann-Vlasov equation including both hard elastic particle collisions and soft interactions mediated by classical Yang-Mills fields. We provide an estimate of the coupling of jets to a hot plasma which is independent of infrared cutoffs. For weakly-coupled anisotropic plasmas the local rotational symmetry in momentum space is broken. The fields develop unstable modes, forming configurations where B_t>E_t and E_z>B_z. This provides a possible explanation for the experimental observation that high-energy jets traversing the plasma perpendicular to the beam axis experience much stronger broadening in rapidity than in azimuth.