Color Instability Visualizations

In the figures below I plot the space time dependence of the color gluon currents generated due to the chromo-Weibel instability in an anisotropic SU(2) plasma. The amplitude of the currents is suppressed (exponental growth) and instead I plot the local color charge of the current by using the map SU(2) -> O(3)/Z(2) and visualizing the O(3)/Z(2) as vectors in RGB space.

The horizontal axis is the spatial direction (z) and the vertical axis is time (t) with t=0 at the bottom and t=final time at the top. The system is initialized with very weak color fields which at first evolve "linearly"; however, at late times the system enters a more complicated turbulent regime characterized by a fluctuating fields which have rather long color correlation lengths.

• M. Strickland, Visualizing Color Plasma Instabilities, Eur. Phys. J. A29, 59-63, PDF, Abstract (2006).
• A talk I gave on non-abelian plasma instabilities in Sept 2006 can be found here.
• A. Rebhan, P. Romatschke and M. Strickland, Quark-Gluon-Plasma Instabilities in Discretized Hard-Loop Approximation, Journal of High Energy Physics 09, 041, PDF, Abstract (2005).
• A. Rebhan, P. Romatschke and M. Strickland, Hard-Loop Dynamics of Non-Abelian Plasma Instabilities, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 102303, PDF, Abstract (2005).