Thermal relaxation, electrical conductivity, and charge diffusion in a hot QCD medium

The response of electromagnetic (EM) fields that are produced in noncentral heavy-ion collisions to electromagnetically charged quark gluon plasma can be understood in terms of charge transport and charge diffusion in the hot QCD medium. This article presents a perspective on these processes by investigating the temperature behavior of the related transport coefficients, viz. electrical conductivity and the charge diffusion coefficients along with charge susceptibility. In the process of estimating them, thermal relaxation times for quarks and gluons have been determined first. These transport coefficients have been studied by solving the relativistic transport equation in the Chapman-Enskog method. For the analysis, 2 -> 2, quark-quark, quarkgluon and gluon-gluon scattering processes are taken into account along with an effective description of hot QCD equations of state (EOSs) in terms of temperature dependent effective fugacities of quasiquarks (antiquarks) and quasigluons. Both improved perturbative hot QCD EOSs at high temperature and a lattice QCD EOS are included for the analysis. The hot QCD medium effects entering through the quasiparticle momentum distributions along with an effective coupling, are seen to have significant impact on the temperature behavior of these transport parameters along with the thermal relaxation times for the quasigluons and quasiquarks.