Lifetime of quasiparticles in hot gauge theories

Abstract

The perturbative calculation of the lifetime of charged excitations in ultrarelativistic plasmas is plagued with infrared divergences which are not eliminated by the screening corrections. The physical processes responsible for these divergences are the collisions involving the exchange of longwavelength, quasistatic, magnetic gluons (or photons), which are not screened by plasma effects. In QED, the leading divergences can be resummed in a non-perturbative treatement based on a generalization of the Bloch-Nordsieck model at finite temperature. The resulting expression of the fermion propagator is free of infrared problems, and exhibits a ``non-exponential'' damping at large times: $S_R(t)\sim exp {-\alpha T t ln\omega_pt}$, where $\omega_p=eT/3$ is the plasma frequency and $\alpha=e^2/4\pi$.