arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Jean-Paul Blaizot.
In this talk I discuss collective excitations that carry fermion quantum numbers. Such excitations occur in the quark-gluon plasma and can also be produced in cold atom systems under special conditions.
It has been suggested previously that an ultra-soft fermionic excitation develops, albeit with a small spectral weight, in a system of massless fermions and scalar bosons with Yukawa interaction at high temperature ($T$). In this paper we study how this excitation is modified at finite chemical potential ($μ$). We relate the existence of the ultra-soft mode to symmetries, in particular charge conjugation, and a supersymmetry of the free system which is spontaneously broken by finite temperature and finite density effects, as argued earlier by Lebedev and Smilga. A non vanishing chemical potential breaks both symmetries explicitly, and maximally at zero temperature where the mode ceases to exist. A detailed calculation indicates that the ultra-soft excitation persists as long as $T\gtrsim μ$.
A high energy jet that propagates in a dense medium generates a cascade of partons that can be described as a classical branching process. A simple generating functional for the probabilities to observe a given number of gluons at a given time is derived. This is used to obtain an evolution equation for the inclusive one-gluon distribution, that takes into account the dependence upon the energy and the transverse momentum of the observed gluon. A study of the explicit transverse momentum dependence of the splitting kernel leads us to identify large corrections to the jet quenching parameter.
In this paper, we study the evolution of a dense system of gluons, such as those produced in the early stages of ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. We describe the approach to thermal equilibrium using the small angle approximation for gluon scattering in a Boltzmann equation that includes the effects of Bose statistics. In the present study we ignore the effect of the longitudinal expansion, i.e., we restrict ourselves to spatially uniform systems, with spherically symmetric momentum distributions. Furthermore we take into account only elastic scattering, i.e., we neglect inelastic, number changing, processes. We solve the transport equation for various initial conditions that correspond to small or large initial gluon phase-space densities. For a small initial phase-space density, the system evolves towards thermal equilibrium, as expected. For a large enough initial phase-space density the equilibrium state contains a Bose condensate. We present numerical evidence that such over-populated systems reach the onset of Bose-Einstein condensation in a finite time. The approach to condensation is characterized by a scaling behavior that we briefly analyze.
We study the diffusion of complex Wishart matrices and derive a partial differential equation governing the behavior of the associated averaged characteristic polynomial. In the limit of large size matrices, the inverse Cole-Hopf transform of this polynomial obeys a nonlinear partial differential equation whose solutions exhibit shocks at the evolving edges of the eigenvalue spectrum. In a particular scenario one of those shocks hits the origin that plays the role of an impassable wall. To investigate the universal behavior in the vicinity of this wall, a critical point, we derive an integral representation for the averaged characteristic polynomial and study its asymptotic behavior. The result is a Bessoid function.
We study the average properties of the gluon cascade generated by an energetic parton propagating through a quark-gluon plasma. We focus on the soft, medium-induced emissions which control the energy transport at large angles with respect to the leading parton. We show that the effect of multiple branchings is important. In contrast with what happens in a usual QCD cascade in vacuum, medium-induced branchings are quasidemocratic, with offspring gluons carrying sizable fractions of the energy of their parent gluon. This results in an efficient mechanism for the transport of energy toward the medium, which is akin to wave turbulence with a scaling spectrum $\sim 1/\sqrtω$. We argue that the turbulent flow may be responsible for the excess energy carried by very soft quanta, as revealed by the analysis of the dijet asymmetry observed in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC.
We link the spontaneous breakdown of chiral symmetry in Euclidean QCD to the collision of spectral shock waves in the vicinity of zero eigenvalue of Dirac operator. The mechanism, originating from complex Burger's-like equation for viscid, pressureless, one-dimensional flow of eigenvalues, is similar to recently observed weak-strong coupling phase transition in large $N_c$ Yang-Mills theory. The spectral viscosity is proportional to the inverse of the size of the random matrix that replaces the Dirac operator in the universal (ergodic) regime. We obtain the exact scaling function and critical exponents of the chiral phase transition for the averaged characteristic polynomial for $N_c \ge3$ QCD. We reinterpret our results in terms of known properties of chiral random matrix models and lattice data.
We compute the two-loop contribution to the QCD pressure in a strong magnetic background, for arbitrary quark masses. We show that, for very large fields, the chiral limit is trivial.
We show that the derivative of the logarithm of the average characteristic polynomial of a diffusing Wishart matrix obeys an exact partial differential equation valid for an arbitrary value of N, the size of the matrix. In the large N limit, this equation generalizes the simple Burgers equation that has been obtained earlier for Hermitian or unitary matrices. The solution through the method of characteristics presents singularities that we relate to the precursors of shock formation in fluid dynamical equations. The 1/N corrections may be viewed as viscous corrections, with the role of the viscosity being played by the inverse of the doubled dimension of the matrix. These corrections are studied through a scaling analysis in the vicinity of the shocks, and one recovers in a simple way the universal Bessel oscillations (so-called hard edge singularities) familiar in random matrix theory.
We report recent progress on understanding the thermalization of the quark-gluon plasma during the early stage in a heavy ion collision. The initially high overpopulation in the far-from-equilibrium gluonic matter ("Glasma") is shown to play a crucial role. The strongly interacting nature (and thus fast evolution) naturally arises as an {\em emergent property} of this pre-equilibrium matter where the intrinsic coupling is weak but the highly occupied gluon states coherently amplify the scattering. A possible transient Bose-Einstein Condensate is argued to form dynamically on a rather general ground. We develop a kinetic approach for describing its evolution toward thermalization, and based on that we find approximate scaling solutions as well as numerically study the onset of condensation.
We study the evolution of an energetic jet which radiates gluons while propagating through a dense QCD medium modeled as a random distribution of color sources. Motivated by the heavy ion experimental program at the LHC, we focus on the medium-induced radiation of (relatively) soft gluons, which are abundantly emitted at large angles and thus can transport a small fraction of the jet energy far away from the jet axis. We perform a complete calculation of the medium-induced gluon branching in the regime where the gluons that take part in the branching undergo multiple soft scattering with the medium. We extend the BDMPSZ theory of radiative energy loss by including the transverse momentum dependence in the kernel that describes the branching and by analyzing the correlations between the two offspring gluons. We demonstrate that these gluons lose color coherence with respect to each other over a time scale that is comparable to the duration of the branching. It follows that interference effects between successive emissions are suppressed, a necessary ingredient for a description of multiple emission of soft gluons by a probabilistic, branching process.
Recently, different proposals have been put forward on how thermalization proceeds in heavy-ion collisions in the idealized limit of very large nuclei at sufficiently high energy. Important aspects of the parametric estimates at weak coupling may be tested using well-established classical-statistical lattice simulations of the far-from-equilibrium gluon dynamics. This has to be confronted with strong coupling scenarios in related theories based on gauge-string dualities. Furthermore, closely related questions about far-from-equilibrium dynamics arise in early-universe cosmology and in non-relativistic systems of ultracold atoms. These were central topics of the EMMI Rapid Reaction Task Force meeting held on December 12-14, 2011, at the University of Heidelberg, which we report on.
After a short elementary introduction to the exact renormalization group for the effective action, I discuss a particular truncation of the hierarchy of flow equations that allows for the determination of the full momentum of the $n$-point functions. Applications are then briefly presented, to critical O(N) models, to Bose-Einstein condensation and to finite temperature field theory.
In this talk, I reflect on the physical origin of the strongly coupled character of the quark-gluon plasma.
These lectures introduce techniques that are used in the description of systems of particles and fields at high temperature (or density). These methods have a broad range of physical applications. We shall discuss two specific applications: one related to hot and dense matter composed of quarks and gluons, with temperatures in the tera Kelvin range, the other related to Bose-Einstein condensation in ultra-cold gases, with temperatures in the nano Kelvin range. As we shall see, in both systems, long wavelength collective phenomena lead to similar features, in spite of the huge difference in orders of magnitude of the respective energy scales.
In ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, the matter formed shortly after the collision is a dense, out of equilibrium, system of gluons characterized by a semi-hard momentum scale $Q_{\rm s}$. Simple power counting arguments indicate that this system is over-occupied: the gluon occupation number is parametrically large when compared to a system in thermal equilibrium with the same energy density. On short time scales, soft elastic scatterings tend to drive the system towards the formation of a Bose--Einstein condensate that contains a large fraction of the gluons while contributing little to the energy density. The lifetime and existence of this condensate depends on whether inelastic processes, that occur on the same time scale as the elastic ones, preferably increase or decrease the number of gluons. During this overpopulated stage, and all the way to thermalization, the system behaves as a strongly interacting fluid, even though the elementary coupling constant is small. We argue that while complete isotropization may never be reached, the system may yet evolve for a long time with a fixed anisotropy between average longitudinal and transverse momenta.
This talk is a brief summary of some theoretical issues in the field of hot and dense QCD matter and ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions.
This is a personal summary of the meeting "Saturation, the Color Glass Condensate and Glasma: What Have we Learned from RHIC?" that took place at BNL in May 2010. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the status of high density QCD and parton saturation, and to review the progress that RHIC has allowed in the field.