Penetrating probes in heavy-ion collisions, like jets and photons, are sensitive to the transport coefficients of the produced quark-gluon plasma, such as shear and bulk viscosity. Quantifying this sensitivity requires a detailed understanding of photon emission and jet-medium interaction in a non-equilibrium plasma. Up to now, such an understanding has been hindered by plasma instabilities which arise out of equilibrium and lead to spurious divergences when evaluating the rate of interaction of hard probes with the plasma. In this paper, we show that taking into account the time evolution of an unstable plasma cures these divergences. We calculate the time evolution of gluon two-point correlators in a setup with small initial momentum anisotropy and show that the gluon occupation density grows exponentially at early times. Based on this calculation, we argue for a phenomenological prescription where instability poles are subtracted. Finally, we show that in the Abelian case instability fields do not affect medium-induced photon emission to our order of approximation.
We study the mechanism responsible for the onset of instabilities in a chiral phase transition at nonzero temperature and baryon chemical potential. As a low-energy effective model, we consider an expanding relativistic plasma of quarks coupled to a chiral field, and obtain a phenomenological chiral hydrodynamics from a variational principle. Studying the dispersion relation for small fluctuations around equilibrium, we identify the role played by chiral waves and pressure waves in the generation of instabilities. We show that pressure modes become unstable earlier than chiral modes.
QCD plasma instabilities, caused by an anisotropic momentum distributions of the particles in the plasma, are likely to play an important role in thermalization in heavy ion collisions. We consider plasmas with two different components of particles, one strongly anisotropic and one isotropic or nearly isotropic. The isotropic component does not eliminate instabilities but it decreases their growth rates. We investigate the impact of plasma instabilities on the first stage of the ``bottom-up'' thermalization scenario in which such a two-component plasma emerges, and find that even in the case o…
The quark-gluon medium described by QCD equations is considered at high energies. Within the assumptions of the linear response theory the chromopermittivity of the medium is introduced and it is argued that it exceeds 1 at TeV energies. The dispersion equations show that the proper modes of the medium reveal instability and the parton currents traversing it induce the emission of Cherenkov gluons. Their distributions at LHC can differ from those typical for lower energies of RHIC because they are determined by the high energy dependence of the chromopermittivity while the latter ones arise du…
We study the role of QCD plasma instabilities in non-equilibrium quark-gluon plasmas. First, we argue that such instabilities must drastically modify the "bottom-up" thermalization scenario for heavy-ion collisions. Second, we discuss conditions for the existence of instabilities in a more general context than previously treated in the QCD literature. We also give a thorough qualitative review of the origin of instabilities. We discuss some mechanisms whereby the growth of plasma instabilities saturates. Finally, we solve explicitly for instabilities and their growth rates for two extreme case…
Plasma instabilities can play a fundamental role in quark-gluon plasma equilibration in the high energy (weak coupling) limit. Early simulations of the evolution of plasma instabilities in non-abelian gauge theory, performed in one spatial dimension, found behavior qualitatively similar to traditional QED plasmas. Later simulations of the fully three-dimensional theory found different behavior, unlike traditional QED plasmas. To shed light on the origin of this difference, we study the intermediate case of two spatial dimensions. Depending on how the "two-dimensional'' theory is formulated, we…
QCD plasma instabilities appear to play an important role in the equilibration of quark-gluon plasmas in heavy-ion collisions in the theoretical limit of weak coupling (i.e. asymptotically high energy). It is important to understand what non-linear physics eventually stops the exponential growth of unstable modes. It is already known that the initial growth of plasma instabilities in QCD closely parallels that in QED. However, once the unstable modes of the gauge-fields grow large enough for non-Abelian interactions between them to become important, one might guess that the dynamics of QCD pla…
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 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 regime, with only a brief phase of subexponential behavior in between.
Hydrodynamical modeling of heavy ion collisions at RHIC suggests that the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) "thermalizes" in a remarkably short time scale, about 0.6 fm/c. We argue that this should be viewed as indicating fast isotropization, but not necessarily complete thermalization, of the non-equilibrium QGP. Non-Abelian plasma instabilities can drive local isotropization of an anisotropic QGP on a time scale which is faster than ordinary perturbative scattering processes. As a result, we argue that theoretical expectations based on weak coupling analysis are not necessarily in conflict with hydro…
In this talk, I review the important role played by plasma instabilities in the thermalization of quark-gluon plasmas at very high energy. [Conference talk presented at Strong and Electroweak Mattter 2004, Helsinki, Finland, June 16--19.]
Due to anisotropic momentum distributions the parton system produced at the early stage of relativistic heavy-ion collisions is unstable with respect to the magnetic plasma modes. The instabilities isotropize the system and thus speed up the process of its equilibration. The whole scenario of the instabilities driven isotropization is reviewed.
Thermalization of quark-gluon plasmas in heavy-ion collisions is a difficult theoretical problem. One theoretical goal has been to understand the physics of thermalization in the relatively simplifying limit of arbitrarily high energy collisions, where the running coupling alpha_s is weak. One of the current roadblocks to achieving this goal is lack of knowledge about the behavior of plasma instabilities when particle distributions are highly anisotropic. In particular, it has not been known how the magnetic fields generated by plasma instabilities scale with anisotropy. In this paper, we use …
Coupling of the quark-gluon plasma from the early stage of heavy-ion collisions is argued to be weaker at LHC than at RHIC. For this reason, the role of instabilities - the pre-equilibrium plasma is unstable with respect to chromomagnetic modes - will be enhanced. The instabilities isotropize the system and speed up the process of equilibration. A possibility to observe direct signals of the instabilities is considered.
The stability of an expanding parton plasma is analyzed within quasi-particle models. The effective mass of the parton is calculated self-consistently from a gap equation which is either obtained from the Nambu Jona-Lasinio Lagrangian or from a fit to observables calculated on the lattice. The latter shows an effective confinement. At thermal equilibrium the stability is studied within thermodynamics (mechanical stability) and via a linear response analysis of the Vlasov equation. The instabilities related to a first-order phase transition are found. For a plasma expanding in three and one dim…
We show that the extensively studied equation of state (EOS) of strongly coupled QED plasma fits the recent lattice EOS data of gluon plasma remarkably well, with appropriate modifications to take account of color degrees of freedom and running coupling constant. Hence we conclude that the quark gluon plasma near the critical temperature is a strongly coupled color-Coulombic plasma.
We study (3+1)D kinetic (Boltzmann-Vlasov) equations for relativistic plasma particles in a one-dimensionally expanding geometry motivated by ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. We set up local equations in terms of Yang-Mills potentials and auxiliary fields that allow simulations of hard-(expanding)-loop (HEL) dynamics on a lattice. We determine numerically the evolution of plasma instabilities in the linear (Abelian) regime and also derive their late-time behavior analytically, which is consistent with recent numerical results on the evolution of the so-called melting color-glass condens…
By considering the Debye screening and damping rate of gluons, the viscosity coefficient of the quark-gluon plasma was evaluated via real-time finite temperature QCD in the relaxation time approximation at finite temperature and chemical potential . The results show that both the damping rate and the chemical potential cause considerable enhancements to the viscosity coefficient of hot dense quark-gluon plasma.
We study the radiative correction to $p_T$-broadening of a fast quark in a quark-gluon plasma beyond the soft gluon approximation. We find that the radiative processes can suppress considerably $p_T$-broadening. This differs dramatically from previous calculations to logarithmic accuracy in the soft gluon approximation, predicting a considerable enhancement of $p_T$-broadening.
At asymptotically high energies, thermalization in heavy ion collisions can be described via weak-coupling QCD. We present a complete treatment of how thermalization proceeds, at the parametric weak-coupling level. We show that plasma instabilities dominate the dynamics, from immediately after the collision until well after the plasma becomes nearly in equilibrium. Initially they drive the system close to isotropy, but Bjorken expansion and increasing diluteness makes the system again become more anisotropic. At time τ~ α^(-12/5) Q^(-1) the dynamics become dominated by a nearly-thermal bath; a…
Chromodynamic fluctuations in the collisionless quark-gluon plasma are found as a solution of the initial value linearized problem. The stable and unstable plasmas are discussed.
We present the first 3+1 dimensional simulations of non-Abelian plasma instabilities in gauge-covariant Boltzmann-Vlasov equations for the QCD gauge group SU(3) as well as for SU(4) and SU(5). The real-time evolution of instabilities for a plasma with stationary momentum-space anisotropy is studied using a hard-loop effective theory that is discretized in the velocities of hard particles. We find that the numerically less expensive calculations using the group SU(2) essentially reproduce the nonperturbative dynamics of non-Abelian plasma instabilities with higher rank gauge groups provided the…
Magnetic plasma instabilities appear to play an important role in the early stages of quark-gluon plasma equilibration in the high energy (weak coupling) limit. Numerical studies of the growth of such instabilities from small seed fluctuations have found initial exponential growth in their energy, followed by linear growth once the associated color magnetic fields become so large that their non-abelian interaction are non-perturbative. In this paper, we use simulations to determine the nature of this linear energy growth. We find that the long-wavelength modes associated with the instability h…
Brief review of the hadronic probes that are used to diagnose the quark-gluon plasma produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions and interrogate its properties. Emphasis is placed on probes that have significantly impacted our understanding of the nature of the quark-gluon plasma and confirmed its formation.
We study a smooth crossover transition in the gas of quark-gluon bags. The equation of state at high temperature is that of the quark-gluon plasma. However, the system consists of the bags with finite volumes which are defined by the model parameters of the mass-volume bag spectrum. Possible structures in this {\it cluster} quark-gluon plasma are classified.
A calculation of the thermal quark propagator is presented taking the gluon condensate above the critical temperature into account. The quark dispersion relation following from this propagator is derived.
We present a calculation of the thermal quark propagator taking the gluon condensate above the critical temperature into account. The quark dispersion relation following from this propagator, describing two massive modes, is discussed.
We study the color randomization of two-gluon states produced after splitting of a primary fast gluon in the quark-gluon plasma. We find that for the LHC conditions the color randomization of the $gg$ pairs is rather slow. At jet energies $E=100$ and $500$ GeV, for typical jet path length in the plasma in central Pb+Pb collisions, the $SU(3)$-multiplet averaged color Casimir of the $gg$ pair differs considerably from its value $2N_c$ for a fully randomized $gg$ state. Our calculations of the energy dependence for generation of the nearly collinear decuplet $gg$ states, that can lead to the bar…
The implications of a numerical error in the photon production rate on the direct photon spectrum of a chemically non-equilibrated quark-gluon plasma are discussed.
We study the radiative correction to $p_\perp$-broadening of a fast quark in a quark-gluon plasma beyond the soft gluon approximation. We find that the radiative contribution to quark $\langle p_\perp^2\rangle$ for RHIC and LHC conditions is negative.
The observational consequences of certain broken symmetries in a thermalised quark gluon plasma are elucidated. The signature under study is the spectrum of dileptons radiating from the plasma, through gluon fusion. Being a pure medium effect, this channel is non-vanishing only in plasmas with explicitly broken charge conjugation invariance. The emission rates are also sensitive to rotational invariance through the constraints imposed by Yang's theorem. This theorem is interpreted in the medium via the destructive interference between various multiple scattering diagrams obtained in the specta…
Plasma instabilities can play a fundamental role in plasma equilibration. There are similarities and differences between plasma instabilities in abelian and non-abelian gauge theories. In particular, it has been an open question whether non-abelian self-interactions are the limiting factor in the growth of non-abelian plasma instabilities. We study this problem with 3+1 dimensional numerical simulations. We find that non-abelian plasma instabilities behave very differently from abelian ones once they grow to be non-perturbatively large, in contrast with earlier results of 1+1 dimensional simul…
A calculation of the thermal quark propagator is presented taking the gluon condensate above the critical temperature into account. The quark dispersion relation and the dilepton production following from this propagator are derived.
We study the (3+1)-dimensional evolution of non-Abelian plasma instabilities in the presence of a longitudinally expanding background of hard particles using the discretized hard loop framework. The free streaming background dynamically generates a momentum-space anisotropic distribution which is unstable to the rapid growth of chromomagnetic and chromoelectric fields. These fields produce longitudinal pressure that works to isotropize the system. Extrapolating our results to energies probed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions we find, however, that a pressure anisotropy persists for a f…
When the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) - a system of deconfined quarks and gluons - is in a nonequilibrium state, it is usually unstable with respect to color collective modes. The instabilities, which are expected to strongly influence dynamics of the QGP produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, are extensively discussed under the assumption that the plasma is weakly coupled. We begin by presenting the theoretical approaches to study the QGP, which include: field theory methods based on the Keldysh-Schwinger formalism, classical and kinetic theories, and fluid techniques. The dispersion equa…
We study the influence of the magnetic field on the photon emission from the quark-gluon plasma created in $AA$ collisions. We find that even for very optimistic assumption on the magnitude of the magnetic field for noncentral $AA$ collisions the effect of magnetic field is very small.
We calculate the probability distribution P(k_\perp) for the momentum perpendicular to its original direction of motion that an energetic quark or gluon picks up as it propagates through weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma in thermal equilibrium.
Recent experiments at RHIC and theoretical considerations indicate that the quark-gluon plasma, present in the fireball of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, might be in a liquid phase. The liquid state can be identified by characteristic correlation and structure functions. Here definitions of the structure functions and pair correlations of the quark-gluon plasma are presented as well as perturbative results. These definitions might be useful for verifying the quark-gluon-plasma liquid in QCD lattice calculations.
We study dimuonium $(μ^+μ^-)$ production in the quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The production is controlled by the process $q\bar q\rightarrow (μ^+μ^-)g$, and the dimuonium motion in the plasma is described by a transport equation. While the electrodynamics dominated dimuonium yield is not high enough, the transverse energy distribution carries the information of the plasma at RHIC and LHC energies.
$\hat q$ is the average squared transverse momentum transfer per unit length to a high-energy particle traversing a QCD medium such as a quark-gluon plasma. We find the (UV-regulated) value of $\hat q$ to leading order in the weak coupling limit, $\alphas(T) \ll 1$. We then use this value to generalize previous analytic results on the gluon bremsstrahlung and pair production rates for massless high-energy particles in a weakly-coupled quark-gluon plasma, at next-to-leading logarithmic order.
We study the rotational collective motion of the quark-gluon plasma in relativistic heavy ion collisions using the widely-adopted AMPT (A Multi-Phase Transport) model. The global angular momentum, the average vorticity carried by the quark-gluon plasma, and the locally defined vorticity fields are computed for Au+Au collisions, with detailed information of their time evolution, spatial distribution, as well as the dependence on beam energy and collision centrality.
The dilepton production rate from the quark-gluon plasma is calculated from the imaginary part of the photon self energy using a quark propagator that contains the gluon condensate. The low mass dilepton rate obtained in this way exhibits interesting structures (peaks and gaps), which might be observable at RHIC and LHC.
The density of states and energy spectrum of the gluon radiation are calculated for the color current of an expanding hydrodynamic skyrmion in the quark gluon plasma with a semiclassical method. Results are compared with those in literatures.
We study the collective modes in relativistic electromagnetic or quark-gluon plasmas with an asymmetry between left- and right-handed chiral fermions, based on the recently formulated kinetic theory with Berry curvature corrections. We find that there exists an unstable mode, signaling the presence of a plasma instability. We argue the fate of this "chiral plasma instability" including the effect of collisions, and briefly discuss its relevance in heavy ion collisions and compact stars.
Non-Abelian plasma instabilities have been proposed as a possible explanation for fast isotropization of the quark-gluon plasma produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We study the real-time evolution of these instabilities in non-Abelian plasmas with a momentum-space anisotropy using a hard-loop effective theory that is discretized in the velocities of hard particles. We extend our previous results on the evolution of the most unstable modes, which are constant in directions transverse to the direction of anisotropy, from gauge group SU(2) to SU(3). We also present first full 3+1-dimen…
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.
The quark-gluon plasma, possibly created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, is a strongly interacting many-body parton system. By comparison with strongly coupled electromagnetic plasmas (classical and non-relativistic) it is concluded that the quark-gluon plasma could be in the liquid phase. As an example for a strongly coupled plasma, complex plasmas, which show liquid and even solid phases, are discussed briefly. Furthermore, methods based on correlation functions for confirming and investigating the quark-gluon-plasma liquid are presented. Finally, consequences of the strong coupli…
We study the behavior of the scalar glueball inside a Quark Gluon Plasma. We follow the fireball from the plasma phase to the hadronic phase and observe that an interesting phenomenon might occur which could have experimental consequences as a signature of Quark Gluon Plasma.
The properties of the quark-gluon plasma(QGP) in the presence of baryon chemical potential are studied using the Field Correlator Method(FCM). At low densities the QGP thermodynamics with the colormagnetic confinement and the Polyakov line interaction is in good agreement with lattice data,and the speed of sound satisfies $C_s^2\leq \frac13$,but in the intermediate range of densities the speed of sound displays a singular behaviour and one needs density modifications of the Polyakov line interaction to avoid instabilities. In particular for $μ_q >0.5$ GeV there exists a region in the $(μ, T)$ …
The historical context of the recent results from high energy heavy ion reactions devoted to the search of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is reviewed, with emphasis on the surprises encountered. The evidence for QGP from heavy ion reactions is compared with that available from particle reactions.
Initially produced quark-gluon matter at RHIC and LHC does not have a temperature. A quark-gluon plasma has a high temperature. From this quark-gluon matter to the quark-gluon plasma is the early thermalization or the rapid creation of temperature. Elastic three-parton scattering plays a key role in the process. The temperature originates from the two-parton scattering, the three-parton scattering, the four-parton scattering and so forth in quark-gluon matter.
I review recent analytical and numerical advances in the study of non-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma physics. I concentrate on studies of the dynamics of plasmas which are locally anisotropic in momentum space. In contrast to locally isotropic plasmas such anisotropic plasmas have a spectrum of soft unstable modes which are characterized by exponential growth of transverse (chromo)-magnetic fields at short times. Parametrically the instabilities provide the fastest method for generation of soft background fields and dominate the short-time dynamics of the system.
Using a temperature-dependent potential obtained from lattice gauge calculations, we study the stability of heavy quarkonia in the quark-gluon plasma. We find that only the Upsilon(1S) and the eta_b(1S) are bound in the quark-gluon plasma, and have a small binding energy. The quark-gluon plasma may be revealed by an Upsilon(1S) dilepton peak with an invariant mass close to twice the current b quark mass, which is lower than the Upsilon(1S) mass in free space. The quarkonia Upsilon(1S) and eta_b(1S) can dissociate by collision with quarks and gluons in the quark-gluon plasma. We evaluate the di…
The quark-gluon plasma close to the critical temperature is a strongly interacting system. Using strongly coupled, classical, non-relativistic plasmas as an analogy, we argue that the quark-gluon plasma is in the liquid phase. This allows to understand experimental observations in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions and to interpret lattice QCD results. It also supports the indications of the presence of a strongly coupled QGP in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.
