Colored plasmons in a quark-gluon plasma near equilibrium

Within a kinetic theory for QCD plasmas we study the color response function near thermodynamic equilibrium. Its poles yield a longitudinal and a transverse collective mode, both starting at the plasma frequency. Due to the gluon contribution there is no Landau damping for these modes, and creation of gluon or q-$\text{p}$ pairs is the dominant damping mechanism. In an electron plasma the generally quoted Landau damping near threshold is shown to be an artifact of the non-relativistic approximation.