Alina Czajka

N=4 Super Yang-Mills Plasma

The N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma is studied in the regime of weak coupling. Collective excitations and collisional processes are discussed. Since the Keldysh-Schwinger approach is used, the collective excitations in both equilibrium and non-equilibrium plasma are under consideration. The dispersion equations of gluon, fermion, and scalar modes are written down and the self-energies, which enter the equations, are computed in the Hard Loop Approximation. The self-energies are discussed in the context of effective action which is also given. The gluon modes and fermion ones appear to be the same as those in the QCD plasma of gluons and massless quarks. The scalar modes are as of a free relativistic massive particle. The binary collisional processes, which occur at the lowest nontrivial order of the coupling constant, are reviewed and then the transport properties of the plasma are discussed. The N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma is finally concluded to be very similar the QCD plasma of gluons and light quarks. The differences mostly reflect different numbers of degrees of freedom in the two systems.

Collisional processes in supersymmetric plasma

Collisional processes in ultrarelativistic N=1 SUSY QED plasma are studied and compared to those in an electromagnetic plasma of electrons, positrons and photons. Cross sections of all binary interactions which occur in the supersymmetric plasma at the order of e^4 are computed. Some processes, in particular the Compton scattering on selectrons, appear to be independent of momentum transfer and thus they are qualitatively different from processes in an electromagnetic plasma. It suggests that transport properties of the SUSY plasma are different than those of its non-supersymmetric counterpart. Energy loss and momentum broadening of a particle traversing the supersymmetric plasma are discussed in detail and the characteristics are shown to be surprisingly similar to those of QED plasma.

Universality of the hard-loop action

The effective actions of gauge bosons, fermions and scalars, which are obtained within the hard-loop approximation, are shown to have unique forms for a whole class of gauge theories including QED, scalar QED, super QED, pure Yang-Mills, QCD, super Yang-Mills. The universality occurs irrespective of a field content of each theory and of variety of specific interactions. Consequently, the long-wavelength or semiclassical features of plasma systems governed by these theories such as collective excitations are almost identical. An origin of the universality, which holds within the limits of applicability of the hard-loop approach, is discussed.

Collective Excitations of Supersymmetric Plasma

Collective excitations of N=1 supersymmetric electromagnetic plasma are studied. Since the Keldysh-Schwinger approach is used, not only equilibrium but also nonequilibrium plasma, which is assumed to be ultrarelativistic, is under consideration. The dispersion equations of photon, photino, electron, and selectron modes are written down and the self-energies, which enter the equations, are computed in the hard loop approximation. The self-energies are discussed in the context of effective action which is also given. The photon modes and electron ones appear to be the same as in the usual ultrarelativistic plasma of electrons, positrons, and photons. The photino modes coincide with the electron ones and the selectron modes are as of a free relativistic massive particle.

Super Yang-Mills Plasma

The N = 4 super Yang-Mills plasma is studied in the regime of weak coupling. Collective excitations and collisional processes are discussed and compared to those of QCD plasma. The two systems are concluded to be very similar to each other with the differences mostly reflecting different numbers of degrees of freedom.

Ghosts in Keldysh-Schwinger Formalism

We discuss how to introduce Faddeev-Popov ghosts to the Keldysh-Schwinger formalism describing equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical systems of quantum fields such as the quark-gluon plasma which is considered. The plasma is assumed to be homogeneous in a coordinate space but the momentum distribution of plasma constituents is arbitrary. Using the technique of generating functional, we derive the Slavnov-Taylor identities and one of them expresses the ghost Greens function, which we look for, through the gluon one. As an application, the Greens function of ghosts is used to compute the gluon polarization tensor in the hard loop approximation which appears to be automatically transverse, as required by the gauge invariance.