Transport Properties of Quark and Gluon Plasmas

Abstract

The kinetic properties of relativistic quark-gluon and electron-photon plasmas are described in the weak coupling limit. The troublesome Rutherford divergence at small scattering angles is screened by Debye screening for the longitudinal or electric part of the interactions. The transverse or magnetic part of the interactions is effectively screened by Landau damping of the virtual photons and gluons transferred in the QED and QCD interactions respectively. Including screening a number of transport coefficients for QCD and QED plasmas can be calculated to leading order in the interaction strength, including rates of momentum and thermal relaxation, electrical conductivity, viscosities, flavor and spin diffusion of both high temperature and degenerate plasmas. Damping of quarks and gluons as well as color diffusion in quark-gluon plasmas is, however, shown not to be sufficiently screened and the rates depends on an infrared cut-off of order the ``magnetic mass", $m_{\rm mag}\sim g^2 T$.