Kinetic equation for gluons at the early stage

Abstract

We derive the kinetic equation for pure gluon QCD plasma in a general way, applying the background field method. We show that the quantum kinetic equation contains a term as in the classical case, that describes a color charge precession of partons moving in the gauge field. We emphasize that this new term is necessary for the gauge covariance of the resulting equation.

Comments: 6 pages, no figure, to appear in the proceedings of the 6th international conference on strange quarks in matter, Frankfurt, Germany, 25-29 september 2001