A Weibel Instability in the Melting Color Glass Condensate

Abstract

Based on hep-ph/0510121, we discuss further the numerical study of classical SU(2) 3+1-D Yang-Mills equations for matter produced in a high energy heavy ion collision. The growth of the amplitude of fluctuations as $\exp{(\Gamma \sqrt{g^2\mu \tau})}$ (where $g^2\mu$ is a scale arising from the saturation of gluons in the nuclear wavefunction) is shown to be robust over a wide range of initial amplitudes that violate boost invariance. We argue that this growth is due to a non-Abelian Weibel instability, the scale of which is set by a dynamically generated plasmon mass. We find good agreement when we relate $\Gamma$ to the prediction from kinetic theory.