Landau-Pomeranchuck-Migdal effect in a quark-gluon plasma and the Boltzmann equation

Abstract

We show how the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect on photon production rates in a quark-gluon plasma can be derived via the usual Boltzmann equation. To do this, we first derive the electromagnetic polarization tensor using linear response theory, and then formulate the Boltzmann equation including the collisions mediated by soft gluon exchanges. We then identify the resulting expression for the production rate with that obtained by the field-theoretic formalism recently proposed by Arnold, Moore and Yaffe. To illustrate the LPM effect we solve the Boltzmann equation in the diffusion approximation.

17 pages, 4 figures Minor rewriting. In particular, the specific small angle behavior of the collision term involved in the LPM effect is better explained. Version accepted for publication in Physics Letters B

References in corpus (2)

• QCD calculations of thermal photon and dilepton production
• Photon and dilepton production in the Quark-Gluon plasma: perturbation theory vs lattice QCD

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Leading Order Calculation of Shear Viscosity in Hot Quantum Electrodynamics from Diagrammatic Methods
• Dilepton and photon production in the presence of a nontrivial Polyakov loop
• Kinetic evolution of the glasma and thermalization in heavy ion collisions
• Ultrasoft fermion mode and off-diagonal Boltzmann equation in quark-gluon plasma at high temperature
• Chiral symmetry breaking and confinement effects on dilepton and photon production around $T_c$