In this study we model early times dynamics of the system produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions by an initial color electric field which then decays to a plasma by the Schwinger mechanism, coupling the dynamical evolution of the initial color
field to the dynamics of the many particles system produced by the decay. The latter is described by relativistic kinetic theory in which we fix the ratio $eta/s$ rather than insisting on specific microscopic processes. We study isotropization and thermalization of the system produced by the field decay for a static box and for a $1+1$D expanding geometry. We find that regardless of the viscosity of the produced plasma, the initial color electric field decays within $1$ fm/c; however in the case $eta/s$ is large, oscillations of the field are effective along all the entire time evolution of the system, which affect the late times evolution of the ratio between longitudinal and transverse pressure. In case of small $eta/s$ ($eta/slesssim0.3$) we find $tau_{isotropization}approx 0.8$ fm/c and $tau_{thermalization}approx 1$ fm/c in agreement with the common lore of hydrodynamics. Moreover we have investigated the effect of turning from the relaxation time approximation to the Chapman-Enskog one: we find that this improvement affects mainly the early times evolution of the physical quantities, the effect being milder in the late times evolution.
In this article we study chiral symmetry breaking for quark matter in a magnetic background, $bm B$, at finite temperature and quark chemical potential, $mu$, making use of the Ginzburg-Landau effective action formalism. As a microscopic model to com
pute the effective action we use the renormalized quark-meson model. Our main goal is to study the evolution of the critical endpoint, ${cal CP}$, as a function of the magnetic field strength, and investigate on the realization of inverse magnetic catalysis at finite chemical potential. We find that the phase transition at zero chemical potential is always of the second order; for small and intermediate values of $bm B$, ${cal CP}$ moves towards small $mu$, while for larger $bm B$ it moves towards moderately larger values of $mu$. Our results are in agreement with the inverse magnetic catalysis scenario at finite chemical potential and not too large values of the magnetic field, while at larger $bm B$ direct magnetic catalysis sets in.
