Effective dynamics of hot, soft non-Abelian gauge fields: Color conductivity and log(1/alpha) effects - art. no. 105020

Bodeker has recently argued that non-perturbative processes in very high te mperature non-Abelian plasmas (such as electroweak baryon number violation in the very hot early Universe) are logarithmically enhanced over previous estimates and take place at a rate per unit volume of order alpha(5)T(4) ln (1/alpha) for small coupling. We give a simple physical interpretation of Bodeker's qualitative and quantitative results in terms of Lent's Law-the f act that conducting media resist changes in the magnetic field-and earlier authors' calculations of the color conductivity of such plasmas. In the pro cess, we resolve some confusion in the Literature about the value of the co lor conductivity and present an independent calculation. We also discuss th e issue of whether the classical effective theory proposed by Bodeker has a good continuum limit. [S0556-2821(99)05008-0].