Dynamics of quark-gluon-plasma instabilities in discretized hard-loop approximation

Abstract

Non-abelian plasma instabilities have been proposed as a possible explanation for fast isotropization of the quark-gluon plasma produced in relativistic heavy-ion colli- sions. We study the real-time evolution of these instabilities in non-abelian plasmas with a momentum-space anisotropy using a hard-loop effective theory that is discretized in the velocities of hard particles. We extend our previous results on the evolution of the most un- stable modes, which are constant in directions transverse to the direction of anisotropy, from gauge group SU(2) to SU(3). We also present first full 3+1-dimensional simulation results based on velocity-discretized hard loops. In contrast to the effectively 1+1-dimensional transversely constant modes we find subexponential behavior at late times.