An analytic study towards instabilities of the glasma

TL;DR

This paper analytically studies the stability of longitudinal color flux fields in high-energy nuclear collisions, revealing magnetic instabilities due to Landau levels and discussing electric field stability with pair creation considerations.

Contribution

It provides an analytical investigation of the time evolution and stability of boost-invariant color fields, highlighting magnetic instabilities and the absence of electric instabilities.

Findings

Magnetic background fields exhibit exponential growth due to Landau level instability.

Electric background fields show no apparent instability, but pair creation may occur.

Analytical approach to the stability of color flux fields in nuclear collisions.

Abstract

Strong longitudinal color flux fields will be created in the initial stage of high-energy nuclear collisions. We investigate analytically time evolution of such boost-invariant color fields from Abelian-like initial conditions, and next examine stability of the boost-invariant configurations against rapidity dependent fluctuations. We find that the magnetic background field has an instability induced by the lowest Landau level whose amplitude grows exponentially. For the electric background field there is no apparent instability although pair creations due to the Schwinger mechanism should be involved.