Gauge Structure and Semi-Classical Aspects of Hard Thermal Loops

Abstract

Hard thermal loops play a central role in the theory of long wavelength excitations of a quark-gluon plasma. We show in this paper how our recent derivation of their generating functional from the Dyson-Schwinger equations sheds light on their semi-classical nature and their remarkable gauge structure. In particular, we show that our kinetic equations can be written in terms of auxiliary gauge fields with zero curvature. Remarkably, the latter property determines entirely the dynamics in the kinematical regime of hard thermal loops. This explains in particular why the generating functional could have been obtained by Taylor and Wong from gauge invariance considerations. It also clarifies the role of Chern-Simons theory in this context.

16 pages LaTex, Saclay preprint T94/03

References in corpus (7)

• Soft Collective Excitations in Hot Gauge Theories
• Deriving the Hard Thermal Loops of QCD from Classical Transport Theory
• High Temperature Response Functions and the Non-Abelian Kubo Formula
• Energy-Momentum Tensors for the Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Hard Thermal Loops, Gauged WZNW Action and the Energy of Hot Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Hard Thermal Loops, Static Response and the Composite Effective Action
• The energy of the high-temperature quark-gluon plasma

Cited by in corpus (24)

• The Quark-Gluon Plasma: Collective Dynamics and Hard Thermal Loops
• Advances in perturbative thermal field theory
• A Boltzmann Equation for the QCD Plasma
• Really Computing Non-perturbative Real Time Correlation Functions
• Physics of Thermal QCD
• Dynamical renormalization group resummation of finite temperature infrared divergences
• On the screening of static electromagnetic fields in hot QED plasmas
• Real-time Relaxation and Kinetics in Hot Scalar QED: Landau Damping
• Ultrasoft Amplitudes in Hot QCD
• Minding one's P's and Q's : from the one loop effective action in quantum field theory to classical transport theory
• Anomalous Kinetics of Hard Charged Particles: Dynamical Renormalization Group Resummation
• Non-perturbative aspects of screening phenomena in abelian and non abelian gauge theories
• Relaxing Near the Critical Point
• A scattering amplitudes approach to hard thermal loops
• Nonlinear dynamics of soft boson excitations in hot QCD plasma I: plasmon-plasmon scattering
• Hard thermal effective actions in the Schwinger formulation
• Physics of Quark--Gluon Plasma
• A simple criterion for effects beyond hard thermal loops
• Towards softer scales in hot QCD
• Hamiltonian formalism for Bose excitations in a plasma with a non-Abelian interaction
• Correlation functions and dissipation in hot QCD
• A generating functional for ultrasoft amplitudes in hot QCD
• Hard thermal effective action in QCD through the thermal operator
• Energy and pressure densities of a hot quark-gluon plasma