Nonabelian plasma instabilities in Bjorken expansion

TL;DR

This paper investigates the growth of non-Abelian plasma instabilities during the longitudinal expansion of a quark-gluon plasma, highlighting their evolution from initial fluctuations to nonlinear regimes.

Contribution

It provides new numerical insights into how unstable modes develop in an expanding plasma, extending previous stationary studies to dynamic, expanding conditions.

Findings

Unstable modes grow significantly during expansion.

Non-Abelian self-interactions become important at large amplitudes.

Results enhance understanding of early-time plasma dynamics.

Abstract

Plasma instabilities are parametrically the dominant nonequilibrium dynamics of a weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma. In recent years the time evolution of the corresponding collective colour fields has been studied in stationary anisotropic situations. Here I report on recent numerical results on the time evolution of the most unstable modes in a longitudinally expanding plasma as they grow from small rapidity fluctuations to amplitudes where non-Abelian self-interactions become important.