Plasmon mass scale in classical nonequilibrium gauge theory

Abstract

Classical lattice Yang-Mills calculations provide a good way to understand different nonequilibrium phenomena in nonperturbatively overoccupied systems. Above the Debye scale the classical theory can be matched smoothly to kinetic theory. The aim of this work is to study the limits of this quasiparticle picture by determining the plasmon mass in classical real-time Yang-Mills theory on a lattice in three spatial dimensions. We compare three methods to determine the plasmon mass: a hard thermal loop expression in terms of the particle distribution, an effective dispersion relation constructed from fields and their time derivatives, and the measurement of oscillations between electric and magnetic field modes after artificially introducing a homogeneous color electric field. We find that a version of the dispersion relation that uses electric fields and their time derivatives agrees with the other methods within 50%.