Decay of Color Gauge Fields in Heavy Ion Collisions and Nielsen-Olesen Instability

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Nielsen-Olesen instabilities contribute to the decay of color gauge fields in the glasma produced during high-energy heavy ion collisions, using a simplified homogeneous field model.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Nielsen-Olesen unstable modes can effectively describe the decay process of the glasma's gauge fields, aligning with recent findings.

Findings

Nielsen-Olesen unstable modes exhibit exponential growth similar to glasma instabilities.

Decay of initial gauge fields is driven by Nielsen-Olesen instability.

Homogeneous weak magnetic fields can reproduce key glasma features.

Abstract

We analyze the behavior of unstable modes in the glasma produced in high energy heavy ion collisions, using a simple model with effective homogeneous longitudinal color electric and magnetic fields. The unstable modes are approximately described as Nielsen-Olesen unstable modes under the homogeneous longitudinal gauge fields. We find that the Nielsen-Olesen unstable modes show properties very similar to those of the exponentially increasing unstable modes in the glasma recently shown by Romatschke and Venugopalan. Although initial gauge fields in the glasma are much stronger than the ones in our model, they decay with the production of the Nielsen-Olesen unstable modes. We discuss why we can reproduce the features of the glasma by using the effective homogeneous weak magnetic fields. Our analysis supports an idea that the decay of the gauge fields in the glasma is caused by Nielsen-Olesen instability.