Joint Seminar in Hadronic Physics/Informal Pizza Seminar

The role of plasma instabilities in quark-gluon plasma equilibration

Peter Arnold

University of Virginia

By what processes and over what time scales does a quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy ion collisions come to local equilibrium and come to exhibit hydrodynamic behavior? The state of theoretical understanding is so poor that the answer is not fully understood even in the weak-coupling limit of QCD (relevant to the theoretical limit of arbitrarily high energy collisions). What's the problem? Plasma instabilities. I will discuss plasma instabilities in non-Abelian plasmas and the progress that is being made in understanding their role in equilibration.