How do you describe a gauge theory losing energy to its surroundings?

Non-Abelian gauge theories—the math behind the strong nuclear force—interact with their surroundings in ways that dissipate energy and create memory effects. Rather than completely erasing the environment, the authors keep it as explicit variables and construct a local system-environment effective field theory using the Schwinger–Keldysh formalism. The approach naturally reproduces hard thermal loop corrections and provides a systematic way to compute color transport and fluctuation-dissipation relations in quark-gluon plasmas.