Equilibration, particle production, and self-energy

The discontinuity, or imaginary part of a self-energy at finite temperature is proportional to the rate at which the corresponding particles are produced when very few of them are present, and also to the rate at which their phase space density approaches the thermal one. These relations were suggested by Weldon [1], who demonstrated them for low orders in perturbation theory. Here we show that they are valid at leading order in a linear coupling of the produced particles, and to all orders in all other interactions of the hot plasma, if there is a separation of the time scales for the production and for the thermalization of the bulk of the plasma.

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