On instabilities of perturbations in some homogeneous color-electric and -magnetic backgrounds in SU(2) gauge theory

Abstract: We consider the instabilities of field perturbations around a homogeneous background color-electric and/or -magnetic field in SU(2) pure gauge theory. We investigate a number of distinct cases of background magnetic and electric fields, and compute the dispersion relations in the linearised theory, identifying stable and unstable momentum modes. In the case of a net homogeneous non-abelian B-field, we compute the non-linear (quadratic and cubic) corrections to the equation of motion, and quantify to what extent the instabilities are tempered by these non-linearities.