Parton Energy Loss in an Unstable Quark-Gluon Plasma

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework to analyze how fast partons lose energy in an unstable quark-gluon plasma, revealing exponential growth of unstable mode contributions, with applications to two-stream systems.

Contribution

It introduces an initial value problem approach to study parton energy loss in unstable plasmas, extending previous equilibrium results to unstable conditions.

Findings

Unstable modes contribute exponentially to energy loss.

The method reproduces known equilibrium results.

Application to two-stream system demonstrates exponential growth.

Abstract

The energy loss of a fast parton scattering elastically in a weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma is formulated as an initial value problem. The approach is designed to study an unstable plasma, but it reproduces the well known result in the case of an equilibrium plasma. Contributions to the energy loss due to unstable modes are shown to exponentially grow in time. An unstable two-stream system is considered as an example.