Hard Thermal Loops and QCD Thermodynamics

Abstract

The conventional weak-coupling expansion for thermodynamic quantities in hot field theories shows poor convergence unless the coupling constant is tiny. I discuss screened perturbation theory (SPT) which is a way of reorganizing the perturbative expansion for scalar theories %by adding and subtracting a local mass term in the Lagrangian, and hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory (HTLPT), which is its generalization to gauge theories. I present results for the pressure to three loops in SPT and to two loops in HTLPT. We compare the latter with three- and four-dimensional lattice simulations of pure-glue QCD.

Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures, Talk given at Conference on Strong and Electroweak Matter (SEWM 2002), Heidelberg, Germany, October 2-5 2002