Effective kinetic theory for high temperature gauge theories

By P. Arnold, Guy D. Moore, Laurence G. Yaffe. 2002

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quasiparticle dynamics in relativistic plasmas associated with hot, weakly-coupled gauge theories (such as QCD at asymptotically high temperature T) can be described by an effective kinetic theory, valid on sufficiently large time and distance scales. The appropriate Boltzmann equations depend on effective scattering rates for various types of collisions that can occur in the plasma. The resulting effective kinetic theory may be used to evaluate observables which are dominantly sensitive to the dynamics of typical ultrarelativistic excitations. This includes transport coefficients (viscosities and diffusion constants) and energy loss rates. In this paper, we show how to formulate effective Boltzmann equations which will be adequate to compute such observables to leading order in the running coupling g(T) of high-temperature gauge theories [and all orders in 1/log g(T)?1]. As previously proposed in the literature, a leading-order treatment requires including both 22 particle scattering processes as well as effective ``12'' collinear splitting processes in the Boltzmann equations. The latter account for nearly collinear bremsstrahlung and pair production/annihilation processes which take place in the presence of fluctuations in the background gauge field. Our effective kinetic theory is applicable not only to near-equilibrium systems (relevant for the calculation of transport coefficients), but also to highly non-equilibrium situations, provided some simple conditions on distribution functions are satisfied.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d34bce3b51b4a19bc3f56018b3f3f77fec0f16e8

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Citations in the corpus

Boost invariant flow, black hole formation, and far-from-equilibrium dynamics in N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory (2009, background): “Much has been learned about near-equilibrium dynamics at weak coupling where a quasiparticle picture is valid [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], and there has also been considerable progress understanding certain theories at very strong coupling [6, 7, 8, 9], thanks to the development of gauge/gravity duality [10, 11”
Momentum broadening in an anisotropic plasma (2006, background): “I would like to thank Rob Pisarski for suggesting to look into this problem and Adrian Dumitru, Peter Jacobs, Anton Rebhan and Larry Yaffe for fruitful discussions.”
Collective Phenomena in the Non-Equilibrium Quark-Gluon Plasma (2008, background): “However, even this is nontrivial since within non-Abelian theories there are at least two possible collisional frequencies to be considered [173, 174, 59, 175, 176]: (1) the frequency for hard-hard scatterings which is parametrically νhard ∼ α(2)s logα−1 s and (2) the frequency for hard-soft scatter”
Transport coefficients in high temperature gauge theories. 2. Beyond leading log (2003, methodology): “For a complete discussion, and a derivation of the initial integral equation presented below, see refs. [ 22 , 29, 31].”