QCD Plasma Instabilities and Bottom-Up Thermalization

Abstract

We study the role of QCD plasma instabilities in non-equilibrium quark-gluon plasmas. First, we argue that such instabilities must drastically modify the "bottom-up" thermalization scenario for heavy-ion collisions. Second, we discuss conditions for the existence of instabilities in a more general context than previously treated in the QCD literature. We also give a thorough qualitative review of the origin of instabilities. We discuss some mechanisms whereby the growth of plasma instabilities saturates. Finally, we solve explicitly for instabilities and their growth rates for two extreme cases of anisotropic non-equilibrium plasmas that can be treated relatively simply and analytically: $f(\p) = F(p_\perp) \delta(p_z)$ and $f(\p) = F(p_z) \delta^{(2)}(p_\perp)$, where $f(\p)$ is the distribution of particles in momentum space.