Speaker
Description
Penetrating probes in heavy-ion collisions, like jets and photons, are sensitive to the transport coefficients of the produced quark-gluon plasma. Quantifying this sensitivity requires a detailed understanding of photon emission and jet-medium interaction in a non-equilibrium plasma during the hydrodynamic stages of heavy-ion collisions. Up to now, such an understanding has been hindered by plasma instabilities. These instabilities arise out of equilibrium and lead to spurious divergences when evaluating the rate of interaction of hard probes with the plasma. In this talk, we show that taking into account the time evolution of an unstable plasma cures these divergences. Specifically, we calculate the time evolution of gluon two-point correlators in a setup with a small initial momentum anisotropy and show that it factorizes into a term describing a fluctuating cloud of soft gluons and a finite, time-dependent term that describes the instabilities. Finally, we discuss phenomenological implications for probes of non-equilibrium plasma.
