Chiral instabilities & the onset of chiral turbulence in QED plasmas

Understand

We present a first principles study of chiral plasma instabilities and the onset of chiral turbulence in QED plasmas far from equilibrium.

• By performing classical-statistical lattice simulations of the microscopic theory, we show that the generation of strong helical magnetic fields from a helicity imbalance in the fermion sector proceeds via three distinct phases.
• During the initial linear instability regime the helicity imbalance of the fermion sector causes an exponential growth(damping) of magnetic field modes with right(left) handed polarization, for which we extract the characteristic growth (damping) rates.
• Secondary growth of unstable modes accelerates the helicity transfer from fermions to gauge fields and ultimately leads to the emergence of a self-similar scaling regime characteristic of decaying turbulence, where magnetic helicity is efficiently transferred to macroscopic length scales.