  Many-particle QED is applied to kinetic theory of radiative processes in
many- component plasmas with relativistic electrons and nonrelativistic heavy
particles. Within the framework of nonequilibrium Green's function technique,
transport and mass-shell equations for fluctuations of the electromagnetic
field are obtained. We show that the transverse field correlation functions can
be decomposed into sharply peaked (non-Lorentzian) parts that describe resonant
(propagating) photons and off-shell parts corresponding to virtual photons in
plasmas. Analogous decomposi- tions are found for the longitudinal field
correlation functions and the correlation functions of relativistic electrons.
As a novel result a kinetic equation for the reso- nant photons with a finite
spectral width is derived. The off-shell parts of the particle and field
correlation functions are shown to be essential to calculate the local ra-
diating power in relativistic plasmas and recover the results of vacuum QED.
The influence of plasma effects and collisional broadening of the relativistic
quasiparticle spectral function on radiative processes is discussed.
