Hard thermal loops in the real-time formalism

Abstract

We present a systematic discussion of Braaten and Pisarski's hard thermal loop (HTL) effective theory within the framework of the real-time (Schwinger-Keldysh) formalism. As is well known, the standard imaginary-time HTL amplitudes for hot gauge theory express the polarization of a medium made out of nonabelian charged point-particles; we show that the complete real-time HTL theory includes, in addition, a second set of amplitudes which account for Gaussian fluctuations in the charge distributions, but nothing else. We give a concise set of graphical rules which generate both set of functions, and discuss its relation to classical plasma physics.

14 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Heavy quark diffusion in perturbative QCD at next-to-leading order
• On the equivalence between the Boltzmann equation and classical field theory at large occupation numbers