I discuss recent advances in the understanding of non-equilibrium gauge field
dynamics in plasmas which have particle distributions 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. The long-time behavior of such instabilities depends on whether or
not the gauge group is abelian or non-abelian. I will report on recent
numerical simulations which attempt to determine the long-time behavior of an
anisotropic non-abelian plasma within hard-loop effective theory. For novelty I
will present an interesting method for visualizing the time-dependence of SU(2)
gauge field configurations produced during our numerical simulations.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Contribution to Proceedings of Workshop on
Quark-Gluon-Plasma Thermalization, Vienna, Austria, Aug 10-12. For full
resolution images see
http://www.fias.uni-frankfurt.de/home/strickland/instability