Baryonic thermal screening mass at NLO

TL;DR

This paper calculates the next-to-leading order correction to the baryonic thermal screening mass using a dimensionally reduced effective theory, revealing a modest increase at electroweak temperatures.

Contribution

It provides the first NLO correction to baryonic screening masses in a thermal QCD setting using a novel hyperspherical harmonics approach.

Findings

NLO correction increases the screening mass by about 4.6% at electroweak temperatures.

The calculation employs a 3-body Schrödinger equation with a two-dimensional hyperspherical harmonics method.

The correction is computed at order g^2, improving the understanding of thermal screening in QCD.

Abstract

We determine the resummed 1-loop correction to a baryonic thermal screening mass. The calculation is carried out in the framework of a dimensionally reduced effective theory, where quarks are heavy fields due to their non-zero Matsubara frequencies. The correction due to interactions is computed at O($g^2_{ }$) in the coupling constant. In order to solve a 3-body Schr\"odinger equation, we exploit a two-dimensional generalization of the hyperspherical harmonics method. At electroweak scale temperatures, the NLO correction represents a $\sim 4.6 \%$ increase of the free-theory value $3\pi T$ of the screening mass.