Instability driven thermalization of a QGP

by Michael Strickland (University of Helsinki)

Thursday 21 Oct 2004, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

The surprising phenomenological success of hydrodynamic models in describing relativistic heavy ion data from RHIC implies that the matter produced during these events becomes isotropic and thermalized within ~ 0.5 fm/c. In contrast, current perturbative estimates of the isotropization/thermalization time are 5-10 times longer than this. In this talk I will describe progress in understanding the early time evolu-tion of an expanding quark-gluon plasma created during a relativistic heavy ion collision. I will focus on the collective modes of a plasma which has a hard-particle distribution function which has an anisot-ropy in momentum space induced by its natural expansion. I will show that in addition to a new stable collective mode there are two additional unstable collective modes (electric and magnetic). These instabilities provide a mechanism for the isotropization of an expanding quark-gluon plasma which is parametrically faster than collisional mechanisms.