On the dispersion of fundamental particles in QCD and N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory

Abstract

We study thermal corrections to the dispersion relations of massive fundamental particles immersed in weakly coupled non-Abelian plasmas. The cases covered include quarks in the QCD (quark-gluon) plasma, as well as N=2 quarks and scalars in an N=4 Super Yang-Mills plasma. We perform the calculations to leading order in a weak coupling expansion, and consider all mass scales of the fundamental fields, ranging from massless particles all the way to bare masses parametrically larger than the temperature.

Comments: 41 pages, 8 figures; v2 to be published in JHEP, with one table added to summarize results