A Weibel Instability in the Melting Color Glass Condensate

Based on hep-ph/0510121, we discuss further the numerical study of classical SU(2) 3+1-D Yang-Mills equations for matter produced in a high energy heavy ion collision. The growth of the amplitude of fluctuations as $\exp{(\Gamma \sqrt{g^2\mu \tau})}$ (where $g^2\mu$ is a scale arising from the saturation of gluons in the nuclear wavefunction) is shown to be robust over a wide range of initial amplitudes that violate boost invariance. We argue that this growth is due to a non-Abelian Weibel instability, the scale of which is set by a dynamically generated plasmon mass. We find good agreement when we relate $\Gamma$ to the prediction from kinetic theory.Comment: 8 pages, invited talk at Workshop on Quark Gluon Plasma Thermalization, Vienna, August 10th-12th, 200

Chemical composition of the decaying glasma

The the initial stage of a relativistic heavy ion collision can be described by a classical color field configuration known as the Glasma. The production of quark pairs from this background field is then computed nonperturbatively by numerically solving the Dirac equation in the classical background. The result seems to point towards an early chemical equilibration of the plasma.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, invited talk at Stangeness in Quark Matter 2006 (SQM06), UCLA, March 200