2007/06/04 by Peter Arnold, Guy D. Moore
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.76.045009
published as Phys.Rev.D76:045009,2007 · 29 pages, 17 figures
arxiv created 2007/06/04 · openalex publication_date 2007/08/17 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Thermalization of quark-gluon plasmas in heavy-ion collisions is a difficult theoretical problem. One theoretical goal has been to understand the physics of thermalization in the relatively simplifying limit of arbitrarily high energy collisions, where the running coupling \ensuremathαs is weak. One of the current roadblocks to achieving this goal is lack of knowledge about the behavior of plasma instabilities when particle distributions are highly anisotropic. In particular, it has not been known how the magnetic fields generated by plasma instabilities scale with anisotropy. In this paper, we use numerical simulations in a first attempt to determine this scaling.