334 research outputs found
Non-abelian plasma instabilities for strong anisotropy
We numerically investigate gauge field instabilities in anisotropic SU(2)
plasmas using weak field initial conditions. The growth of unstable modes is
stopped by non-abelian effects for moderate anisotropy. If we increase the
anisotropy the growth continues beyond the non-abelian saturation bound. We
find strong indications that the continued growth is not due to over-saturation
of infrared field modes, but instead due to very rapid growth of high momentum
modes which are not unstable in the weak field limit. The saturation amplitude
strongly depends on the initial conditions. For strong initial fields we do not
observe the sustained growth.Comment: 28 pages, 17 figure
Moduli decay in the hot early Universe
We consider moduli fields interacting with thermalized relativistic matter.
We determine the temperature dependence of their damping rate and find it is
dominated by thermal effects in the high temperature regime, i.e. for
temperatures larger than their mass. For a simple scalar model the damping rate
is expressed through the known matter bulk viscosity. The high temperature
damping rate is always smaller than the Hubble rate, so that thermal effects
are not sufficient for solving the cosmological moduli problem.Comment: Numerical error in the final result for the damping rate corrected,
conclusions of the paper are not affecte
Fluctuations from dissipation in a hot non-Abelian plasma
We consider a transport equation of the Boltzmann-Langevin type for
non-Abelian plasmas close to equilibrium to derive the spectral functions of
the underlying microscopic fluctuations from the entropy. The correlator of the
stochastic source is obtained from the dissipative processes in the plasma.
This approach, based on classical transport theory, exploits the well-known
link between a linearized collision integral, the entropy and the spectral
functions. Applied to the ultra-soft modes of a hot non-Abelian (classical or
quantum) plasma, the resulting spectral functions agree with earlier findings
obtained from the microscopic theory. As a by-product, it follows that
B\"odeker's effective theory is consistent with the fluctuation-dissipation
theorem.Comment: 9 pages, revtex, no figures, identical to published versio
Hard thermal loops for soft or collinear external momenta
We consider finite temperature 1-loop diagrams with hard loop momenta and an
arbitrary number of external gauge fields when the external momenta are either
soft, or near the light cone and nearly collinear with the loop momentum. We
obtain a recursion relation for these diagrams which we translate into an
equation for their generating functional. By integrating out the soft fields
while keeping two collinear ones we find an integral equation, originally due
to Arnold, Moore, and Yaffe, which sums the bremsstrahlung and pair
annihilation contribution to the thermal photon production rate.Comment: 17 pages, title corrected, clarifying paragraph added to the
appendix, version to appear in JHE
A remark on non-Abelian classical kinetic theory
It is known that non-Abelian classical kinetic theory reproduces the Hard
Thermal/Dense Loop (HTL/HDL) effective action of QCD, obtained after
integrating out the hardest momentum scales from the system, as well as the
first higher dimensional operator beyond the HTL/HDL level. We discuss here its
applicability at still higher orders, by comparing the exact classical
effective action obtained in the static limit, with the 1-loop quantum
effective potential. We remark that while correct types of operators arise, the
classical colour algebra reproduces correctly the prefactor of the 4-point
function only for matter in asymptotically high dimensional colour
representations.Comment: 6 page
Bubble wall velocities in the Standard Model and beyond
We present results for the bubble wall velocity and bubble wall thickness during a cosmological first-order phase transition in a condensed form. Our results are for minimal extensions of the Standard Model but in principle are applicable to a much broader class of settings. Our first assumption about the model is that only the electroweak Higgs is obtaining a vacuum expectation value during the phase transition. The second is that most of the friction is produced by electroweak gauge bosons and top quarks. Under these assumptions the bubble wall velocity and thickness can be deduced as a function of two equilibrium properties of the plasma: the strength of the phase transition and the pressure difference along the bubble wall
Purely perturbative Boltzmann equation for hot non-Abelian gauge theories
In the perturbation theory, trasnport phenomena in hot non-Abelian gauge
theories like QCD are often plagued with infrared singularities or
nonperturbative effects. We show, in the context of the Kadanoff & Baym
formalism, that there are certain nonequilibrium processes which are free from
such difficulties. For these processes, due to an interplay between the
macroscopic and microscopic physics, characteristic time scale (the mesoscale)
naturally enters as an infrared cutoff and purely perturbative description by
the Boltzmann equation is valid.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, to appear in Physical Review
High temperature color conductivity at next-to-leading log order
The non-Abelian analog of electrical conductivity at high temperature has
previously been known only at leading logarithmic order: that is, neglecting
effects suppressed only by an inverse logarithm of the gauge coupling. We
calculate the first sub-leading correction. This has immediate application to
improving, to next-to-leading log order, both effective theories of
non-perturbative color dynamics, and calculations of the hot electroweak baryon
number violation rate.Comment: 47 pages, 6+2 figure
The finite temperature real time \hbar^2 corrections in quantum mechanics
We study non-perturbative real time correlation functions at finite
temperature. In order to see whether the classical term gives a good
approximation in the high temperature limit T >> \hbar\omega, we consider the
first \hbar^2 quantum corrections. We find that for the simplest non-trivial
case, the quantum mechanical anharmonic oscillator, the classical result is
reliable only for moderately large times: after some time t_* the classical
approximation breaks down even at high temperatures. Moreover, the result for
the first quantum corrections cannot, in general, be reproduced by modifying
the parameters of the classical theory.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure
Problem of the noise-noise correlation function in hot non-Abelian plasma
In this work on the basis of Kadomtsev's kinetic fluctuation theory we
present the more general expression for noise-noise correlation function in
effective theory for ultrasoft field modes.Comment: 3 pages, REVTeX
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