Speaker
Description
QCD kinetic theory is an established method for modeling the time evolution of deconfined QCD matter and is also applicable out of equilibrium. It has been used to study how an initially far-from-equilibrium QCD plasma thermalizes and hydrodynamizes. However, numerical implementations employ simplified assumptions in evaluating the high-dimensional phase-space integral, such as a simplified treatment of the in-medium resummed propagators, or the assumption of local isotropy (isotropic screening). In this talk, I will show that including the hard thermal loop propagators leads to a reduction of the specific shear viscosity and reduces the maximum anisotropy reached in Bjorken expanding plasmas. Furthermore, I will present results for the gluon splitting rates in an anisotropic plasma, which are needed as input for the inelastic collision kernel. In Bjorken expanding plasmas, these gluon splitting rates drastically differ from those using the approximations employed in current implementations. This highlights the need for a better treatment of anisotropies in kinetic theory simulations.
Based on:
[1] Phys.Rev.D 110 (2024) 7, 7 (Boguslavski, Lindenbauer)
[2] arXiv:2509.03868 (Altenburger, Boguslavski, Lindenbauer)
[3] arXiv:2509.09897 (Lindenbauer)