Effect of gravitational waves on Yang-Mills condensates

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the interactions of a Yang-Mills (YM) wave fluctuation of a classical isotropic, homogeneous YM condensate, which models gluon plasma, with a gravitational wave (GW). We re-analyse the study of fluctuations of the gluon plasma using vector decomposition of the gauge field into scalar, longitudinal, and transverse modes. We find that there is an energy transfer between isotropic gluon condensate and plasmon modes, but the effect is delayed due to GW, and dependent on the initial conditions. We also study quarks in the background of YM condensate and GW. We find that the quarks break the isotropy of the condensate and the GW couples quarks of different flavours of the SU(2) group. Thus, the GW induces flavour fluctuations, which has interesting implications for experimental observations and quark-gluon plasma physics.