Quark-Gluon Plasmas and Thermalization

Abstract

In these lectures, I will attempt a pedagogical and qualitative introduction to the theory of equilibrium and thermalization of quark-gluon plasmas. I assume only that the reader is familiar with quantum field theory at zero temperature and with QCD as the theory of the strong interactions. I focus on the limit of small alpha_s, which in principle should be relevant at extremely high temperature because of asymptotic freedom, and in any case provides a clean theoretical context in which to discuss a variety of phenomena. Topics discussed include the basic equilibrium formalism for finite-temperature quantum field theory, Debye screening, electric deconfinement, magnetic confinement, dimensional reduction, plasma waves, kinetic theory, hydrodynamic properties such as viscosity, the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect, thermalization in (arbitrarily high energy) heavy ion collisions, and QCD plasma instabilities.

40 pages; based on lectures given at X Hadron Physics in Florianopolis, SC, Brazil, March 26-31, 2007 [another small typo fixed]

References in corpus (8)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• Bottom-up thermalization in heavy ion collisions
• Entropy and Temperature of Black 3-Branes
• The pressure of hot QCD up to g^6 ln(1/g)
• Suppression of Bremsstrahlung and Pair Production due to Environmental Factors
• The non-Abelian Debye screening length beyond leading order
• Classical Transport Theory and Hard Thermal Loops in the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• On the Apparent Convergence of Perturbative QCD at High Temperature

Cited by in corpus (39)

• Nearly Perfect Fluidity: From Cold Atomic Gases to Hot Quark Gluon Plasmas
• Electromagnetic fields and anomalous transports in heavy-ion collisions --- A pedagogical review
• SU(N) gauge theories at large N
• The First Magnetic Fields
• Heavy Quarkonium in Extreme Conditions
• Post-Inflationary Gravitino Production Revisited
• QCD Splitting/Joining Functions at Finite Temperature in the Deep LPM Regime
• Thermalization of gluons with Bose-Einstein condensation
• Gravitational Production of a Conformal Dark Sector
• Large-N kinetic theory for highly occupied systems
• Chiral Langevin theory for non-Abelian plasmas
• Shear Viscosity of a Gluon Plasma in Perturbative QCD
• Dissipative force on an external quark in heavy quark cloud
• Thermodynamic bootstrap program for integrable QFT's: Form factors and correlation functions at finite energy density
• Fluctuating relativistic dissipative hydrodynamics as a gauge theory
• Holography, Hydrodynamization and Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Renormalised nonequilibrium quantum field theory: scalar fields
• Some aspects of QGP phase in a hQCD model
• Glasma Evolution and Bose-Einstein Condensation with Elastic and Inelastic Collisions
• Viscosity of an ideal relativistic quantum fluid: A perturbative study
• Collisional strong-field QED kinetic equations from first principles
• Classical vs quantum corrections to jet broadening in a weakly-coupled Quark-Gluon Plasma
• How Perfect a Gluon Plasma Can Be in Perturbative QCD?
• Kinetic evolution of the glasma and thermalization in heavy ion collisions
• Effect of back reaction on entanglement and subregion volume complexity in strongly coupled plasma
• Magnetic field influence on the early time dynamics of heavy-ion collisions
• Electrodynamics at non-zero temperature, chemical potential, and Bose condensate
• Quasi-diagonal Inhomogeneous Closure for Classical and Quantum Statistical Dynamics
• Collisional corrections to spin polarization from quantum kinetic theory using Chapman-Enskog expansion
• The Gribov problem in presence of background field for $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills theory
• Local QCD Action at Finite Temperature
• Recent progress in hard-thermal-loop QCD thermodynamics and collective excitations
• A non-perturbative study of the evolution of cosmic magnetised sources
• Schwinger-Dyson Equations in Coulomb Gauge Consistent with Numerical Simulation
• Shear Viscosity in Weakly Coupled N-Component Scalar Field Theories
• The functional generalization of the Boltzmann-Vlasov equation and its Gauge-like symmetry
• Anomalous Viscosity of the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Chaotic thermalization in Yang-Mills-Higgs theory on a spacial lattice
• A general relativistic kinetic theory approach to linear transport in generic hydrodynamic frame