Nonperturbative excitations in overoccupied gluon plasmas

Motivated by the early-time dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, we extract gluonic spectral functions of overoccupied gauge theories far from equilibrium using classical-statistical lattice simulations and linear response theory. In 3+1 dimensions we find that the spectral function exhibits quasiparticle excitations at all momenta that are mostly consistent with perturbative hard-thermal loop predictions,...