Some aspects of thermal field theories

Abstract

Different formalisms used in the perturbative approach to Thermal Field Theory (TFT) are briefly reviewed. The rate of production of a virtual photon in a quark-gluon plasma is then discussed to illustrate some features of TFT before introducing the Hard Thermal Loop resummation which improves the behaviour of the theory in the infrared sector. Some of the successes of this appraoch are described before turning to the problems associated to the undamped transverse gluon oscillations and the light-cone singularities arising when on-shell and/or massless particles are involved.