Progress in Anisotropic Plasma Physics

In 1959 Weibel demonstrated that when a QED plasma has a temperature anisotropy there exist unstable transverse magnetic excitations which grow exponentially fast. In this paper we will review how to determine the growth rates for these unstable modes in the weak-coupling and ultrarelativistic limits in which the collective behavior is describable in terms are so-called “hard-loops”. We will show that in this limit QCD is subject to instabilities which are analogous to the Weibel instability in QED. The presence of such instabilities dominates the early time evolution of a highly anisotropic plasma; however, at longer times it is expected that these instabilities will saturate (condense). We will discuss how the presence of non-linear interactions between the gluons complicates the determination of the saturated state. In order to discuss this we present the generalization of the Braaten-Pisarski isotropic hard-thermal-loop effective action to a system with a temperature anisotropy in the parton distribution functions. The resulting hard-loop effective action can be used to determine the time and energy scales associated with the possible saturation (condensation) of the gluonic modes. We will also discuss the effects of anisotropies on observables, in particular on the heavy quark energy loss.