2005/05/31 by Peter Arnold, Guy D. Moore, Laurence G. Yaffe · 10 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Ionosphere and magnetosphere dynamics #hep-lat #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.72.054003
published as Phys.Rev.D72:054003,2005 · 28 pages, 22 figures [minor changes incorporated (including some minor typo fixes) to correspond to journal version]
openalex publication_date 2005/09/08 · arxiv created 2005/09/28 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Plasma instabilities can play a fundamental role in plasma equilibration. There are similarities and differences between plasma instabilities in Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories. In particular, it has been an open question whether non-Abelian self-interactions are the limiting factor in the growth of non-Abelian plasma instabilities. We study this problem with 3+1 dimensional numerical simulations. We find that non-Abelian plasma instabilities behave very differently from Abelian ones once they grow to be nonperturbatively large, in contrast with earlier results of 1+1 dimensional simulations. In particular, they grow more slowly at late times, with linear rather than exponential dependence of magnetic energy on time.