What can we learn from electromagnetic plasmas about the quark–gluon plasma?

Abstract

Ultra-relativistic electromagnetic plasmas can be used for improving our understanding of the quark–gluon plasma. In the weakly coupled regime, both plasmas can be described by transport theoretical and quantum field theoretical methods leading to similar results for the plasma properties (dielectric tensor, dispersion relations, plasma frequency, Debye screening, transport coefficients, damping and particle production rates). In particular, future experiments with ultra-relativistic electron–positron plasmas in ultra-strong laser fields might open the possibility of testing these predictions, e.g. the existence of a new fermionic plasma wave (plasmino). In the strongly coupled regime, electromagnetic plasmas such as complex plasmas can be used as models or at least analogies for the quark–gluon plasma possibly produced in relativistic heavy-ion experiments. For example, pair correlation functions can be used to investigate the equation of state and cross section enhancement for parton scattering can be explained.