Instabilities of an anisotropically expanding non-Abelian plasma: 3D+3V discretized hard-loop simulations

Understand

We study the (3+1)-dimensional evolution of non-Abelian plasma instabilities in the presence of a longitudinally expanding background of hard particles using the discretized hard loop framework.

• The free streaming background dynamically generates a momentum-space anisotropic distribution which is unstable to the rapid growth of chromomagnetic and chromoelectric fields.
• These fields produce longitudinal pressure that works to isotropize the system.
• Extrapolating our results to energies probed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions we find, however, that a pressure anisotropy persists for a few fm/c.