Real-time relaxation and kinetics in hot scalar QED: Landau damping
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania 15260 (United States)
- LPTHE, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) et Denis Diderot (Paris VII), Tour 16, 1er. etage, 4, Place Jussieu, 75252 Paris, Cedex 05 (France)
- Department of Physics, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 (United States)
- Department of Physics, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973 (United States)
The real time evolution of non-equilibrium expectation values with soft length scales {approximately}k{sup {minus}1}{gt}(eT){sup {minus}1} is solved in hot scalar electrodynamics, with a view towards understanding relaxational phenomena in the QGP and the electroweak plasma. We find that the gauge invariant non-equilibrium expectation values relax via {ital power laws} to asymptotic amplitudes that are determined by the quasiparticle poles. The long time relaxational dynamics and relevant time scales are determined by the behavior of the retarded self-energy not at the small frequencies, but at the Landau damping thresholds. This explains the presence of power laws and not of exponential decay. In the process we rederive the HTL effective action using {ital non-equilibrium} field theory. Furthermore we obtain the influence functional, the Langevin equation and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem for the soft modes, identifying the correlators that emerge in the classical limit. We show that a Markovian approximation fails to describe the dynamics {ital both} at short and long times. We find that the distribution function for soft quasiparticles relaxes with a power law through Landau damping. We also introduce a novel kinetic approach that goes beyond the standard Boltzmann equation by incorporating off-shell processes and find that the distribution function for soft quasiparticles relaxes with a power law through Landau damping. We find an unusual dressing dynamics of bare particles and anomalous (logarithmic) relaxation of hard quasiparticles. {copyright} {ital 1998} {ital The American Physical Society}
- OSTI ID:
- 670272
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review, D, Vol. 58, Issue 12; Other Information: PBD: Dec 1998
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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