Abstract
Non-Abelian plasma instabilities may be responsible for the fast apparent quark-gluon thermalization in relativistic heavy-ion collisions if their exponential growth is not hindered by nonlinearities. We study numerically the real-time evolution of instabilities in an anisotropic non-Abelian plasma with an SU(2) gauge group in the hard-loop approximation. We find exponential growth of non-Abelian plasma instabilities both in the linear and in the strongly nonlinear regimes, with only a brief phase of subexponential behavior in between.
- Received 6 December 2004
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.102303
©2005 American Physical Society