Friday, October 5, 2012

1206.3336 (Kevin Dusling et al.)

Instability induced pressure isotropization in a longitudinally
expanding system
   [PDF]

Kevin Dusling, Thomas Epelbaum, François Gelis, Raju Venugopalan
In two previous works [arXiv:1009.4363,arXiv:1107.0668], we studied the time evolution of a system of real scalar fields with quartic coupling which shares important features with the Color Glass Condensate description of heavy ion collisions. Our primary objective was to understand how such a system, when initialized with a non-perturbatively large classical field configuration, reaches thermal equilibrium. An essential goal of these works was to highlight the role played by the quantum fluctuations. However, these studies considered only a system confined within a box of fixed volume. In the present paper, we extend this work to a system that expands in the longitudinal direction thereby more closely mimicking a heavy ion collision. We conclude that the microscopic processes that drive the system towards equilibrium are able to keep up with the expansion of the system; the pressure tensor becomes isotropic despite the anisotropic expansion.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3336

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