Parametric instabilities and plasma heating in an inhomogeneous plasma

Strong ion-sound parametric turbulence and anomalous anisotropic plasma heating in helicon plasma sources

Experimentally observed anisotropic ion heating in helicon plasma sources may result from the interaction of ions with ion-sound turbulence. The ion-sound turbulence develops due to excitation of the short scale, kinetic, parametric ion-sound instability. From the quasilinear equation for the ion distribution function, which includes the induced scattering of ion-sound waves by ions, the turbul...

Resonant Parametric Excitation in Lower-hybrid Heating of Tokamak Plasma*

Quark-gluon Plasma Thermalization and Plasma Instabilities

Here is a basic question: What is the (local) thermalization time for quarkgluon plasmas (QGPs) in heavy ion collisions? That’s a difficult question, so let’s ask a simpler one: What is it for arbitrarily high energy collisions, where the running coupling constant is small, αs ≪ 1? Even that turns out to be complicated, so let me focus on an even simpler version, first posed by Baier, Mueller, ...

Plasma instabilities in an anisotropically expanding geometry.

We study (3+1)D kinetic (Boltzmann-Vlasov) equations for relativistic plasma particles in a one dimensionally expanding geometry motivated by ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. We set up local equations in terms of Yang-Mills potentials and auxiliary fields that allow simulations of hard- (expanding-) loop dynamics on a lattice. We determine numerically the evolution of plasma instabilitie...

Thermalization and plasma instabilities

I review recent analytical and numerical advances in the study of non-equilibrium quarkgluon plasma physics. I concentrate on studies of the dynamics of plasmas which are locally anisotropic in momentum space. In contrast to locally isotropic plasmas such anisotropic plasmas have a spectrum of soft unstable modes which are characterized by exponential growth of transverse (chromo)-magnetic fiel...