We consider weakly magnetized hot QED plasma comprising electrons and positrons. There are three distinct dispersive (longitudinal and two transverse) modes of a photon in a thermomagnetic medium. At lowest order in the coupling constant, a photon is damped in this medium via Compton scattering and pair creation process. We evaluate the damping rate of hard photon by calculating the imaginary part of the each transverse dispersive modes in a thermomagnetic QED medium. We note that one of the fermions in the loop of one-loop photon self-energy is considered as soft and the other one is hard. Considering the resummed fermion propagator in a weakly magnetized medium for the soft fermion and the Schwinger propagator for hard fermion, we calculate the soft contribution to the damping rate of hard photon. In weak field approximation the thermal and thermomagnetic contributions to damping rate get separated out for each transverse dispersive mode. The total damping rate for each dispersive mode in presence of magnetic field is found to be reduced than that of the thermal one. This formalism can easily be extended to QCD plasma.

• Received 5 November 2019
• Accepted 18 February 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.101.056007

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Published by the American Physical Society