Classical Kinetics of Hard Thermal Phenomena in High Temperature QCD

Abstract

Classical transport theory for colored particles is reviewed and used to derive the hard thermal loops of QCD. A perturbative study of the non-Abelian transport equations that preserves their gauge symmetry is used to compute the induced color current in a hot quark-gluon plasma. From this approach the effective action of hard thermal loops can be derived. This derivation is more direct than alternative ones based on perturbative quantum field theory, and shows that hard thermal effects in hot QCD are essentially classical.