Renormalisation of the Nonperturbative Thermal Pressure

Abstract

We show how the fully resummed thermal pressure is rendered ultraviolet finite by standard zero-temperature renormalisation. The analysis is developed in a 6-dimensional scalar model that mimics QED and has $N$ flavours. The $N\to \infty$ limit of the model can be calculated completely. At a critical temperature, one of the degrees of freedom has vanishing screening mass like the transverse gauge bosons in four-dimensional finite-temperature perturbation theory. The renormalised nonperturbative interaction pressure of this model is evaluated numerically.

Comments: 27 pages, plain tex, with 10 figures embedded using epsf