Informal Pizza Seminar

Instabilities in non-abelian plasmas

Dietrich Bodeker

CERN & Bielefeld University

I describe a numerical lattice study of instabilities in strongly anisotropic SU(2) plasmas. We find that the energy grows quasi-exponentially beyond the naive saturation bound for weak field initial conditions. The growth appears to stop only due to the finite lattice spacing. The lattice spacing dependence of the final energy density indicates that the continued growth is due to rapid energy transfer into high momentum modes which are not unstable in the weak field regime. This behavior is also seen in the gauge field spectrum in Coulomb gauge.