Nonabelian Debye screening, tsunami waves, and worldline fermions

Abstract

I give a pedagogical review of the derivation for the effective lagrangian for nonabelian Debye screening, or hard thermal loops. Following Kelly, Liu, Lucchesi, and Manuel, I give the simplest derivation possible, using classical kinetic theory. The result is valid not just for a thermal, but for an arbitrary initial distributions. I use this to study the evolution, at short times, of a gluonic ``tsunami wave''. I also suggest how classical kinetic theory may arise at one loop order. Using the wordline representation of the one loop effective action, I follow D'Hoker and Gagné to replace the Wilson line by an integral over worldline fermions. A bilinear of these worldline fermions naturally defines a nonabelian charge, whose equation of motion is Wong's equation.

16 pages, LaTeX, requires crckapb.sty. To appear in the proceedings of the International School of Astrophysics ``D. Chalonge'', Erice, Italy, Sept. 4-15, 1997; also based on a talk given at the RIKEN BNL Workshop on ``Non-equilibrium many body dynamics'', Upton, N.Y., Sept. 23-25, 1997

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• Instabilities of an anisotropically expanding non-Abelian plasma: 1D+3V discretized hard-loop simulations
• Wong's equations and the small x effective action in QCD
• Non-equilibrium evolution of a `Tsunami': Dynamical Symmetry Breaking
• Minding one's P's and Q's : from the one loop effective action in quantum field theory to classical transport theory
• Inflation from Tsunami-waves
• Super Yang-Mills Plasma