ACTION FOR THE HOT GLUON PLASMA BASED ON THE CHERN-SIMONS THEORY

We show that the generating functional for hard thermal loops with external gluons in QCD is essentially given by the eikonal for a Chern-Simons gauge theory. This action, determined essentially by gauge-invariance arguments, also gives an efficient way of obtaining the hard thermal loop contributions without the more involved calculation of Feynman diagrams.