Nonabelian Debye screening, tsunami waves, and worldline fermions

Abstract

I give a pedagogical review of the derivation for the effective lagrangian for nonabelian Debye screening, or hard thermal loops. Following Kelly, Liu, Lucchesi, and Manuel, I give the simplest derivation possible, using classical kinetic theory. The result is valid not just for a thermal, but for an arbitrary initial distributions. I use this to study the evolution, at short times, of a gluonic ``tsunami wave''. I also suggest how classical kinetic theory may arise at one loop order. Using the wordline representation of the one loop effective action, I follow D'Hoker and Gagné to replace the Wilson line by an integral over worldline fermions. A bilinear of these worldline fermions naturally defines a nonabelian charge, whose equation of motion is Wong's equation.