Real-Time Thermal Corrections to Pair-Production Processes in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Abstract

It is an honour to address this talk to an audience which celebrates the work done by Rolf Hagedorn on the statistical bootstrap. There is a connection between the physics of the “fire-ball” so beautifully developed by Hagedorn and his many collaborators and what I will describe in my talk: I will focus my attention on some aspects of relativistic thermal quantum field theory in the context of the physics of the quark-gluon plasma. Thermal field theories are in general convenient tools for studying elementary physical processes in the presence of a thermal environment. The physical influence on elementary processes of a thermal environment can sometimes be expressed in terms of effective parameters (see e.g. Refs.1, 2).