Heavy Ion Tea

Elliptic Flow from Viscous Hydrodynamics and Transport
Stanislaw Mrowczynski (Institute for Nuclear Studies, Warsaw, Poland)

Abstract: Experimental data suggest that the quark-gluon plasma produced at the early stage of relativistic heavy-ion collisions reaches equilibrium within 1 fm/c. Inter-parton collisions seem to be too `slowĠ to equilibrate the system so fast. However, due to anisotropic momentum distribution the parton system is unstable with respect to the chromo-magnetic plasma modes. These color instabilities appear to effectively isotropize the system and thus speed up the process of its equilibration. A whole scenario of the instabilities driven equilibration is reviewed.