Pade Improvement of the Free Energy in High Temperature QCD

Abstract

Pade approximants (PA's) are constructed from the perturbative coefficients of the free energy through O(g^5) in hot QCD. Pade summation is shown to reduce the renormalization-scale dependence substantially even at temperature (T) as low as 250 MeV. Also, PA's predict that the free energy does not deviate more than 10 % from the Stefan-Boltzmann limit for T > 250 MeV.

Comments: Typos corrected. Minor changes in the text and references. To appear in Phys. Rev. D