Hard-thermal-loop Resummation of the Free Energy of a Hot Quark-Gluon Plasma

TL;DR

This paper calculates the quark contribution to the free energy of a hot quark-gluon plasma using hard-thermal-loop resummation, capturing plasma effects like screening and damping to improve accuracy over standard weak-coupling methods.

Contribution

It introduces a leading-order HTL perturbation theory calculation that resums plasma effects, providing a more accurate free energy estimate in hot QCD.

Findings

HTL resummation captures plasma effects like screening and damping.

The one-loop HTL free energy error is of order alpha_s.

Large corrections of order alpha_s^(3/2) are included exactly.

Abstract

The quark contribution to the free energy of a hot quark-gluon plasma is calculated to leading order in hard-thermal-loop (HTL) perturbation theory. This method selectively resums higher order corrections associated with plasma effects, such as screening, quasiparticles, and Landau damping. Comparing to the weak-coupling expansion of QCD, the error in the one-loop HTL free energy is of order alpha_s, but the large alpha_s^(3/2) correction from QCD plasma effects is included exactly.