Nonlinear Landau damping of a plasmino in the quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

On the basis of the Blaizot-Iancu equations, which are a local formulation of the hard thermal loop (HTL) equations of motion for soft fluctuating quark and gluon fields and their induced sources, the coupled kinetic equations for plasminos and plasmons are obtained. The equality of matrix elements for nonlinear scattering of a plasmino by hard particles in covariant and temporal gauges is established by using effective Ward identities. The model problem of the interaction of two infinitely narrow packets with fermion and boson quantum numbers is considered. The kinematical relations between wave vectors of the plasmino and plasmon are derived, when the effective pumping over of the plasma excitation energy from the fermion branch of plasma excitations to the boson branch and vice versa occur. The expression for the nonlinear Landau damping rate of a plasmino at rest is found, and a comparison with a plasmino damping constant obtained within the framework of the hard thermal loop approximation is made. The nonlinear Landau damping rate for normal quark excitations is shown to diverge like $1/\sqrt{q^2}$ near the light cone where $q$ is a four-momentum of excitations, and the improved Blaizot-Iancu equations removing this divergence are proposed.