Soft Fields and Hard Particles in Hot Gauge Plasmas

Abstract

It is shown that the long wavelength excitations of a quark-gluon plasma may be described as collective oscillations of self-consistent average fields to which the plasma particles couple. Their properties are obtained from a set of coupled mean field and kinetic equations, derived from the general Dyson-Schwinger equations, as the leading order in a systematic expansion in powers of the coupling. By solving the kinetic equations, one obtains in closed form the generating functionals for all the leading order amplitudes between soft quasiparticles, the so-called ``hard thermal loops''.