Scale Invariant Resummed Perturbation at Finite Temperatures

Abstract

We use the scalar model with quartic interaction to illustrate how a nonperturbative variational technique combined with renormalization group (RG) properties efficiently resums perturbative expansions in thermal field theories. The resulting convergence and scale dependence of optimized thermodynamical quantities, here illustrated up to two-loop order, are drastically improved as compared to standard perturbative expansions, as well as to other related methods such as the screened perturbation or (resummed) hard-thermal-loop perturbation, that miss RG invariance as we explain. Being very general and easy to implement, our method is a potential analytical alternative to deal with the phase transitions of field theories such as thermal QCD.

Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure. v2: additional explanations on the generically improved scale invariance at higher orders, typos corrected, figure quality improved, to appear in Phys.Rev.Lett