Nuclear Theory Seminar - Raju Venugopalan (Brookhaven National Laboratory), "Universal Turbulent Attractor in a Highly Occupied Non-Abelian Plasma"

Classical-statistical simulations can be employed to study the temporal evolution of overoccupied non-Abelian plasmas.

Performing the largest such simulations to date, we report on emergent self-similar behavior that is independent of initial conditions. The scaling exponents of the corresponding quasi-stationary non-thermal attractor are universal and characteristic of weak wave turbulence for systems across a wide range of energy scales. Our results allow us to  distinguish between different kinetic theory scenarios in the classical regime. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for resolving the outstanding problem of the thermalization of the quark-gluon plasma.