The chromo-weibel instability

Abstract

I discuss the physics of non-Abelian plasmas which are locally anisotropic in momentum space. Such momentum-space anisotropies are generated by the rapid longitudinal expansion of the matter created in the first 1 fm/c of an ultrarelativistic heavy ion collision. In contrast to locally isotropic plasmas anisotropic plasmas have a spectrum of soft unstable modes which are characterized by exponential growth of transverse chromomagnetic/-electric fields at short times. This instability is the QCD analogue of the Weibel instability of QED. Parametrically the chromo-Weibel instability provides the fastest method for generation of soft background fields and dominates the short-time dynamics of the system. The existence of the chromo-Weibel instability has been proven using diagrammatic methods, transport theory, and numerical solution of classical Yang-Mills fields. I review the results obtained from each of these methods and discuss the numerical techniques which are being used to determine the late-time behavior of plasmas subject to a chromo-Weibel instability.

Modified ion-Weibel instability as a possible source of wave activity at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

“…Weibel instabilities are also excited in relativistic plasmas (Yoon and Davidson, 1987) and for relativistic shocks (Milosavljević et al, 2006). This type of instability is even derived from electroweak (Silva et al, 2000) and quark-gluonen plasmas (Arnold and Moore, 2006;Strickland, 2007) and is considered as an alternative source for quasi-stationary magnetic fields besides dynamos (Treumann and Baumjohann, 2012). Furthermore, in gyrotropic or unmagnetized plasmas the existence of a pure growing mode has also been shown based on general linear fluctuation theory and fluctuation-dissipation theorems .…”

“…5 (left) and the solar wind velocity as group velocity yielding L char = u 0SW /γ c ≈ 1000-1700 km ≈ L Amp . Hence, the modified ion-Weibel instability is a convective instability (Sturrock, 1958) propagated by the solar wind.…”

Dijet induced collective modes in an anisotropic quark-gluon plasma

“…In the static limit, for small θ n some of the scales appearing in the dispersion relations are negative implying that the whole system is unstable with respect to magnetic instability [17,18]. It has been demonstrated that in case of k n(θ n = 0), the growth rate of the filamentation instabilities is the largest [10,11,15].…”

Summary talk for ISMD 06

“…Strikland presented arguments that during the Glasma phase, the initially approximately boost invariant distribution of particles is unstable with respect to formation of rapidity dependent density fluctuations [20]. The seeds of these fluctuations arise in the quantum wavefunctions for the hadrons, and over time become amplified to a magnitude typical of the Glasma fields.…”