The Quark gluon plasma: Collective dynamics and hard thermal loops
Jan, 2001210 pages
Published in:
- Phys.Rept. 359 (2002) 355-528
e-Print:
- hep-ph/0101103 [hep-ph]
Report number:
- SACLAY-T01-005,
- CERN-TH-2000-272
Citations per year
Abstract:
We present a unified description of the high temperature phase of QCD, the so-called quark-gluon plasma, in a regime where the effective gauge coupling is sufficiently small to allow for weak coupling calculations. The main focuss is the construction of the effective theory for the collective excitations which develop at a typical scale , which is well separated from the typical energy of single particle excitations which is the temperature . We show that the plasma particles provide a source for long wavelength oscillations of average fields which carry the quantum numbers of the plasma constituents, the quarks and the gluons. To leading order in , the plasma particles obey simple gauge-covariant kinetic equations, whose derivation from the general Dyson-Schwinger equations is outlined. As a by-product, the ``hard thermal loops'' emerge naturally in a physically transparent framework. We show that the collective excitations can be described in terms of classical fields, and develop for these a Hamiltonian formalism. The effect of collisions among the hard particles is also studied, in particular in relation with the effective theory for ultrasoft excitations, with momenta .Note:
- 210 pages, 33 figures, submitted to Physics Reports Report-no: SACLAY-T01/005, CERN-TH/2000
- quantum chromodynamics: plasma
- field theory: finite temperature
- quark gluon: plasma
- excited state: collective phenomena
- loop space
- Dyson-Schwinger equation: solution
- field theory: classical
- Hamiltonian formalism
- correlation function
- effect: fluctuation
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