339 research outputs found
Matching pre-equilibrium dynamics and viscous hydrodynamics
We demonstrate how to match pre-equilibrium dynamics of a 0+1 dimensional
quark gluon plasma to 2nd-order viscous hydrodynamical evolution. The matching
allows us to specify the initial values of the energy density and shear tensor
at the initial time of hydrodynamical evolution as a function of the lifetime
of the pre-equilibrium period. We compare two models for the pre-equilibrium
quark-gluon plasma, longitudinal free streaming and collisionally-broadened
longitudinal expansion, and present analytic formulas which can be used to fix
the necessary components of the energy-momentum tensor. The resulting dynamical
models can be used to assess the effect of pre-equilibrium dynamics on
quark-gluon plasma observables. Additionally, we investigate the dependence of
entropy production on pre-equilibrium dynamics and discuss the limitations of
the standard definitions of the non-equilibrium entropy.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures,v2: minor modifications and updated references.
Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Thermalization and the chromo-Weibel instability
Despite the apparent success of ideal hydrodynamics in describing the
elliptic flow data which have been produced at Brookhaven National Lab's
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, one lingering question remains: is the use of
ideal hydrodynamics at times t < 1 fm/c justified? In order to justify its use
a method for rapidly producing isotropic thermal matter at RHIC energies is
required. One of the chief obstacles to early isotropization/thermalization is
the rapid longitudinal expansion of the matter during the earliest times after
the initial nuclear impact. As a result of this expansion the parton
distribution functions become locally anisotropic in momentum space. In
contrast to locally isotropic plasmas anisotropic plasmas have a spectrum of
soft unstable modes which are characterized by exponential growth of transverse
chromo-magnetic/-electric fields at short times. This instability is the QCD
analogue of the Weibel instability of QED. Parametrically the chromo-Weibel
instability provides the fastest method for generation of soft background
fields and dominates the short-time dynamics of the system.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, Invited plenary talk given at the 19th
International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions:
Quark Matter 2006 (QM 2006), Shanghai, China, 14-20 Nov 200
Jet broadening in unstable non-Abelian plasmas
We perform numerical simulations of the QCD Boltzmann-Vlasov equation
including both hard elastic particle collisions and soft interactions mediated
by classical Yang-Mills fields. We provide an estimate of the coupling of jets
to a hot plasma which is independent of infrared cutoffs. For weakly-coupled
anisotropic plasmas the local rotational symmetry in momentum space is broken.
The fields develop unstable modes, forming configurations where B_t>E_t and
E_z>B_z. This provides a possible explanation for the experimental observation
that high-energy jets traversing the plasma perpendicular to the beam axis
experience much stronger broadening in rapidity than in azimuth.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, version accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.C,
typos fixed, more detailed discussion of q-ha
Jet energy loss in the quark-gluon plasma by stream instabilities
We study the evolution of the plasma instabilities induced by two jets of
particles propagating in opposite directions and crossing a thermally
equilibrated non-Abelian plasma. In order to simplify the analysis we assume
that the two jets of partons can be described with uniform distribution
functions in coordinate space and by Gaussian distribution functions in
momentum space. We find that while crossing the quark-gluon plasma, the jets of
particles excite unstable chromomagnetic and chromoelectric modes. These fields
interact with the particles (or hard modes) of the plasma inducing the
production of currents; thus, the energy lost by the jets is absorbed by both
the gauge fields and the hard modes of the plasma. We compare the outcome of
the numerical simulations with the analytical calculation performed assuming
that the jets of particles can be described by a tsunami-like distribution
function. We find qualitative and semi-quantitative agreement between the
results obtained with the two methods.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
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