Lessons from Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities in Two Spatial Dimensions

Understand

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.