Collective modes of an anisotropic hot QCD medium have been studied within the semiclassical transport theory employing the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) collisional kernel. The modeling of the isotropic medium is primarily based on a recent quasiparticle description of a hot QCD equation of state where the medium effects have been encoded in effective gluon and quark/antiquark momentum distributions that posses nontrivial energy dispersions. The anisotropic distribution functions are obtained in a straightforward way by stretching or squeezing the isotropic ones along one of the directions. The gluon self-energy is computed using these distribution functions in a linearized transport equation with the BGK collisional kernel. Further, the tensor decomposition of gluon self-energy leads to the structure functions which eventually controls the dispersion relations and the collective mode structure of the medium. It has been seen that both the medium effects and collisions induce appreciable modifications to the collective modes or the plasma excitations in the hot QCD medium.

• Received 9 September 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.034007