The nonperturbative contribution to asymptotic masses

Abstract

In gauge theories, charged particles obey modified dispersion due to medium interactions (forward scattering), leading at high energies $E\ge T$ to an asymptotic mass-squared $m_{\infty }^2$. We calculate the infrared part of this mass nonperturbatively for the theory of the strong interactions, QCD, through a lattice treatment of its low-energy effective description, Electrostatic QCD (EQCD). Incorporation of these results into a nonperturbative determination of the effective thermal mass will require a still-incomplete next-to-leading order perturbative matching of this quantity to full QCD.

Comments: 21 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables; corrected for sign error in free solution, inserted comment on EB correlator