05.70.Ln Nonequilibrium and irreversible thermodynamics (see also 82.40.Bj Oscillations, chaos, and bifurcations in physical chemistry and chemical physics)
Refine
Year of publication
- 2008 (1)
Document Type
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Language
- English (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (1)
Keywords
- Anisotropie (1)
- Feldtheorie (1)
- Instabilität (1)
- Kinetische Theorie (1)
- Nichtgleichgewicht (1)
- Photon (1)
- Quark-Gluon-Plasma (1)
- Schwerionenkollisionen (1)
- Thermalisierung (1)
- anisotropy (1)
Institute
- Physik (1)
In this work we study the non-equilibrium dynamics of a quark-gluon plasma, as created in heavy-ion collisions. We investigate how big of a role plasma instabilities can play in the isotropization and equilibration of a quark-gluon plasma. In particular, we determine, among other things, how much collisions between the particles can reduce the growth rate of unstable modes. This is done both in a model calculation using the hard-loop approximation, as well as in a real-time lattice simulation combining both classical Yang-Mills-fields as well as inter-particle collisions. The new extended version of the simulation is also used to investigate jet transport in isotropic media, leading to a cutoff-independent result for the transport coefficient $hat{q}$. The precise determination of such transport coefficients is essential, since they can provide important information about the medium created in heavy-ion collisions. In anisotropic media, the effect of instabilities on jet transport is studied, leading to a possible explanation for the experimental observation that high-energy jets traversing the plasma perpendicular to the beam axis experience much stronger broadening in rapidity than in azimuth. The investigation of collective modes in the hard-loop limit is extended to fermionic modes, which are shown to be all stable. Finally, we study the possibility of using high energy photon production as a tool to experimentally determine the anisotropy of the created system. Knowledge of the degree of local momentum-space anisotropy reached in a heavy-ion collision is essential for the study of instabilities and their role for isotropization and thermalization, because their growth rate depends strongly on the anisotropy.