A new approach to determine the thermodynamics of deconfined matter to high accuracy

Abstract

We demonstrate that at finite density and sufficiently high temperatures, phase-quenched (PQ) lattice simulations combined with perturbation theory provide a new precision approach to determining the thermodynamics of QCD across a wide arc of the phase diagram where the strong coupling constant ${\alpha }_s$ remains small. In this regime, nonperturbative pairing effects in the PQ theory are parametrically suppressed, so that the difference between the PQ and full QCD pressures becomes a small perturbative correction. We compute this correction up to and including $O({\alpha }_s^{7/2})$ using electrostatic QCD together with a novel numerical method to compute four-loop sum-integrals. This enables the determination of the perturbative QCD pressure with precision beyond the current state of the art while including nonperturbative pure-gluonic contributions from the lattice.

Comments: 14 pages including appendices and refs, 2 figures, 1 table. v2: journal version