Quark-Gluon Plasmas and Thermalization

Abstract

In these lectures, I will attempt a pedagogical and qualitative introduction to the theory of equilibrium and thermalization of quark-gluon plasmas. I assume only that the reader is familiar with quantum field theory at zero temperature and with QCD as the theory of the strong interactions. I focus on the limit of small alpha_s, which in principle should be relevant at extremely high temperature because of asymptotic freedom, and in any case provides a clean theoretical context in which to discuss a variety of phenomena. Topics discussed include the basic equilibrium formalism for finite-temperature quantum field theory, Debye screening, electric deconfinement, magnetic confinement, dimensional reduction, plasma waves, kinetic theory, hydrodynamic properties such as viscosity, the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect, thermalization in (arbitrarily high energy) heavy ion collisions, and QCD plasma instabilities.