  Aspects of the formation and equilibration of a quark-gluon plasma are
explored using a quantum kinetic equation, which involves a non-Markovian,
Abelian source term for quark and antiquark production and, for the collision
term, a relaxation time approximation that defines a time-dependent
quasi-equilibrium temperature and collective velocity. The strong Abelian field
is determined via the simultaneous solution of Maxwell's equation. A particular
feature of this approach is the appearance of plasma oscillations in all
thermodynamic observables. Their presence can lead to a sharp increase in the
time-integrated dilepton yield.
