Hard Thermal Loops, Weak Gravitational Fields and The Quark Gluon Energy Momentum Tensor

Abstract

We use an auxiliary field construction to discuss the hard thermal loop effective action associated with massless thermal SU(N) QCD interacting with a weak gravitational field. It is demonstrated that the previous attempt to derive this effective action has only been partially successful and that it is presently only known to first order in the graviton coupling constant. This is still sufficient to enable a calculation of a symmetric traceless quark gluon plasma energy momentum tensor. Finally, we comment on the conserved currents and charges of the derived energy momentum tensor.