No Arabic abstract
We study the spectral properties of a highly occupied non-Abelian non-equilibrium plasma appearing ubiquitously in weak coupling descriptions of QCD matter. The spectral function of this far-from-equilibrium plasma is measured by employing linear response theory in classical-statistical real-time lattice Yang-Mills simulations. We establish the existence of transversely and longitudinally polarized quasiparticles and obtain their dispersion relations, effective mass, plasmon frequency, damping rate and further structures in the spectral and statistical functions. Our new method can be interpreted as a non-perturbative generalization of hard thermal loop (HTL) effective theory. We see indications that our results approach leading order HTL in the appropriate limit. The method can also be employed beyond the range of validity of HTL.
We study the spectral properties of an overoccupied gluonic system far from equilibrium. Using classical Yang-Mills simulations and linear response theory, we determine the statistical and spectral functions. We measure dispersion relations and damping rates of transversally and longitudinally polarized excitations in the gluonic plasma, and also study further structures in the spectral function.
We present a new method to obtain spectral properties of a non-Abelian gauge theory in the region where occupation numbers are high. The method to measure the (single-particle) spectral function is based on linear response theory and classical-statistical lattice simulations. Although we apply it to a system far from equilibrium in a self-similar regime, the extracted spectral function can be understood within the hard thermal loop (HTL) formalism and can thus be connected to thermal equilibrium at high temperatures. This allows us to obtain quantities like the lifetime of quasiparticles that are beyond the leading order and difficult to compute within HTL. The approach has the potential to measure transport coefficients, to study the earliest stages of heavy-ion collisions in a controlled way and it can be employed beyond the range of validity of HTL.
We study how to numerically simulate quantum fermions out of thermal equilibrium, in the context of electroweak baryogenesis. We find that by combining the lattice implementation of Aarts and Smit [1] with the low cost fermions of Borsanyi and Hindmarsh [2], we are able to describe the dynamics of a classical bosonic system coupled to quantum fermions, that correctly reproduces anomalous baryon number violation. To demonstrate the method, we apply it to the 1+1 dimensional axial U(1) model, and perform simulations of a fast symmetry breaking transition. Compared to solving all the quantum mode equations as in [1], we find that this statistical approach may lead to a significant gain in computational time, when applied to 3+1 dimensional physics.
We employ the functional renormalization group approach formulated on the Schwinger-Keldysh contour to calculate real-time correlation functions in scalar field theories. We provide a detailed description of the formalism, discuss suitable truncation schemes for real-time calculations as well as the numerical procedure to self-consistently solve the flow equations for the spectral function. Subsequently, we discuss the relations to other perturbative and non-perturbative approaches to calculate spectral functions, and present a detailed comparison and benchmark in $d=0+1$ dimensions.
We extract the heavy-quark diffusion coefficient kappa and the resulting momentum broadening <p^2> in a far-from-equilibrium non-Abelian plasma. We find several features in the time dependence of the momentum broadening: a short initial rapid growth of <p^2>, followed by linear growth with time due to Langevin-type dynamics and damped oscillations around this growth at the plasmon frequency. We show that these novel oscillations are not easily explained using perturbative techniques but result from an excess of gluons at low momenta. These oscillation are therefore a gauge invariant confirmation of the infrared enhancement we had previously observed in gauge-fixed correlation functions. We argue that the kinetic theory description of such systems becomes less reliable in the presence of this IR enhancement.