Plasma Instabilities in Heavy Ion Collisions

Non-Abelian plasma instabilities play a crucial role in the nonequilibrium dynamics of a weakly coupled quark-gluon plasma. The Chromo-Weibel instabilities have been proposed as a possible mechanism for the fast apparent thermalization of the quark-gluon plasma and have been extensively studied in stationary anisotropic plasmas using the so-called hard-loop approximation. The generalization to the hard-expanding-loop (HEL) formalism allows the (numerical) calculation of the time evolution of gluonic mean fields in the more realistic dynamical case of anisotropic expansion.