Speaker
Description
A system of gluon fields generated at the earliest phase of relativistic heavy-ion
collisions can be described in terms of classical fields. Numerical simulations show that the sys-
tem is unstable but a character of the instability is not well understood. With the intention to
systematically study the problem, we analyze a stability of classical chromomagnetic and chromo-
electric fields which are constant and uniform. We consider the Abelian configurations discussed
in the past where the fields are due to the single-color potentials linearly depending on coordinates.
However, we mostly focus on the nonAbelian configurations where the fields are generated by the
multi-color non-commuting constant uniform potentials. We derive a complete spectrum of small
fluctuations around the background fields which obey the linearized Yang-Mills equations. The
spectra of Abelian and nonAbelian configurations are similar but different and they both include
unstable modes. We briefly discuss the relevance of our results for fields which are uniform only
in a limited spatial domain.
