  The effect of retardation on dynamical mass generation in is studied, in the
imaginary time formalism. The photon porarization tensor is evaluated to
leading order in 1/N (N is the number of flavours), and simple closed form
expressions are found for the fully retarded longitudinal and transverse
propagators, which have the correct limit when T goes to zero. The resulting
S-D equation for the fermion mass (at order 1/N) has an infrared divergence
associated with the contribution of the transverse photon propagator; only the
longitudinal contribution is retained, as in earlier treatments. For solutions
of constant mass, it is found that the retardation reduces the value of the
parameter r (the ratio of twice the mass to the critical temperature) from
about 10 to about 6. The gap equation is then solved allowing for the mass to
depend on frequency. It was found that the r value remained close to 6.
Possibilities for including the transverse propagator are discussed.
