Abstract
To achieve an understanding of the thermalization of a quark-gluon plasma, starting from QCD without using model assumptions, is a formidable task. We study the early stage dynamics of a relativistic heavy ion collision in the framework of real-time simulations of classical Yang-Mills theory in a static box with the color glass condensate as initial condition. Our study generalizes a previous one by Fukushima and Gelis from SU(2) to the realistic case of SU(3). We calculate the chromo-electric and chromomagnetic energy densities as well as the ratio of longitudinal and transverse pressure as a function of time as probes for thermalization. Our preliminary results on coarse lattices show the occurrence of Weibel instabilities prior to thermalization.
Highlights
Experimental results from heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) give strong indications for the occurrence of a quark–gluon plasma (QGP)
In the limit of weak coupling, which is assumed for the present energy scales at the LHC and RHIC, the two nuclei can be described in the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework [10,11,12]
The value for the seed ∆, which controls the fluctuations, is purely artificial. The higher it is, the faster the system thermalizes, but there is an upper bound: Since ∆ only enters the electric part of the initial energy density, we have to monitor its influence on the initial total energy density, which should not significantly change, otherwise the classical approximation is no longer tenable
Summary
Departament de Física Quàntica i Astrofísica and Institut de Ciències del Cosmos (ICC) Universitat de Barcelona, Martí i Franquès 1, 08028 Barcelona, Spain. Institut für Theoretische Physik, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany (Received June 14, 2016). To achieve an understanding of the thermalization of a quark–gluon plasma, starting from QCD without using model assumptions, is a formidable task. We study the early stage dynamics of a relativistic heavy-ion collision in the framework of real-time simulations of the classical Yang– Mills theory in a static box with the color glass condensate as an initial condition. We calculate the chromo-electric and chromo-magnetic energy densities as well as the ratio of longitudinal and transverse pressure as a function of time as probes for thermalization. Our preliminary results on coarse lattices show the occurrence of Weibel instabilities prior to thermalization
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