Role of monopoles in a gluon plasma

We study the role of magnetic monopoles at high enough temperature T>2Tc, when they can be considered heavy, rare objects embedded into matter consisting mostly of the usual 'electric' quasiparticles, quarks, and gluons. We review available lattice results on monopoles at finite temperatures. Then we proceed to classical and quantum charge-monopole scattering, solving the problem of gluon-monopole scattering for the first time. The explicit calculations are performed in the framework of the Georgi-Glashow model; the results that we obtain are nevertheless quite general. Connections to QCD are carefully discussed. We find that, while the gluon-monopole scattering hardly influences thermodynamic quantities, it does produce a large transport cross section, significantly exceeding that for pQCD gluon-gluon scattering up to quite high T. Thus, in spite of their relatively small density at high T, monopoles are extremely important for quark-gluon plasma transport properties, keeping viscosity small enough for hydrodynamics to work at the LHC.