Hard-thermal-loop QED thermodynamics
Abstract
The weak-coupling expansion for thermodynamic quantities in thermal field theories is poorly convergent unless the coupling constant is tiny. We discuss the calculation of the free energy for a hot gas of electrons and photons to three-loop order using hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory (HTLpt). We show that the hard-thermal-loop perturbation reorganization improves the convergence of the successive approximations to the QED free energy at large coupling, e ~ 2. The reorganization is gauge invariant by construction, and due to the cancellations among various contributions, we obtain a completely analytic result for the resummed thermodynamic potential at three loops.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0911.4601,
title = {Hard-thermal-loop QED thermodynamics},
author = {Nan Su and Jens O. Andersen and Michael Strickland},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0911.4601},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
3 pages, 3 figures. Talk given at "The 5-th International Conference on Quarks and Nuclear Physics", September 21-26, 2009, Beijing, China