Speaker
Raju Venugopalan
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Description
We outline significant recent progress in a program to include quantum corrections to the evolution of the classical color fields produced in high-energy ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. Previous work in this direction for a scalar \phi^4 theory [1] has now been extended to QCD. Leading contributions from unstable quantum modes can be resumed to all loop orders and expressed in terms of a gauge invariant spectrum of initial quantum fluctuations, which has been computed recently [2]. These fluctuations play a key role in decoherence of the high occupancy fields, and in their possible isotropization and flow, and in the matching of this initial dynamics to hydrodynamic flow, thereby potentially eliminating a big source of uncertainty in hydrodynamic simulations. We report on progress in the 3+1-D numerical computations implementing these pre-equilibrium dynamics.
[1] K.~Dusling, T.~Epelbaum, F.~Gelis and R.~Venugopalan,
%``Role of quantum fluctuations in a system with strong fields: Onset of hydrodynamical flow,''
Nucl.\ Phys.\ A {\bf 850}, 69 (2011); T.~ Epelbaum and F. Gelis,
%``Role of quantum fluctuations in a system with strong fields: Spectral properties and Thermalization,''
Nucl.\ Phys.\ A {\bf 872}, 210 (2011).
[2] K.~Dusling, F.~Gelis and R.~Venugopalan, %``The initial spectrum of fluctuations in the little bang,''
Nucl.\ Phys.\ A {\bf 872}, 161 (2011).
Primary author
Co-authors
Kevin Dusling
Raju Venugopalan
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Peer reviewing
Paper
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