The Role of Color-Magnetic Monopoles in a Gluonic Plasma

The role of color-magnetic monopoles in a pure gauge plasma at high temperature T>2Tc is considered. In this temperature regime, monopoles can be considered heavy, rare objects embedded into matter consisting mostly of the usual “electric” quasiparticles, quarks and gluons. The gluon-monopole scattering is found to hardly influence thermodynamic quantities, yet it produces a large transport cross section, significantly exceeding that for pQCD gluon-gluon scattering up to quite high T. This mechanism keeps viscosity small enough for hydrodynamics to work at LHC.