Nonabelian plasma instabilities in Bjorken expansion

Abstract

Plasma instabilities are parametrically the dominant nonequilibrium dynamics of a weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma. In recent years the time evolution of the corresponding collective colour fields has been studied in stationary anisotropic situations. Here I report on recent numerical results on the time evolution of the most unstable modes in a longitudinally expanding plasma as they grow from small rapidity fluctuations to amplitudes where non-Abelian self-interactions become important.