The impact of quark masses on pQCD thermodynamics

Abstract

We present results for several thermodynamic quantities within the next-to-leading order calculation of the thermodynamic potential in perturbative QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential including non-vanishing quark masses. These results are compared to lattice data and to higher-order optimized perturbative calculations to investigate the trend brought about by mass corrections.

Comments: V2: Major modifications; 12 pages, 13 figures