Hard thermal loops, weak gravitational fields and the quark-gluon plasma energy-momentum tensor

We use an auxiliary field construction to discuss the hard thermal loop effective action associated with massless thermal SU( N) QCD interacting with a weak gravitational field. It is demonstrated that a previous attempt to derive this effective action has only been partially successful. A symmetric traceless quark-gluon plasma energy-momentum tensor is calculated, including quark contributions. Finally, we comment on the conserved currents and charges of the derived energy-momentum tensor.