Thermal Gauge Field Theories
Abstract
The real- and imaginary-time-formalisms of thermal field theory and their extension to gauge theories is reviewed. Questions of gauge (in-)dependence are discussed in detail, in particular the possible gauge dependences of the singularities of dressed propagators from which the quasiparticle spectrum is obtained. The existing results on next-to-leading order corrections to non-Abelian screening and dispersion laws of hard-thermal-loop quasiparticles are surveyed. Finally, the role of the asymptotic thermal masses in self-consistent approximations to thermodynamic potentials is described and it is shown how the problem of the apparently poor convergence of thermal perturbation theory might be overcome.
Cite
@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0105183,
title = {Thermal Gauge Field Theories},
author = {Anton Rebhan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0105183},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
Lectures delivered at the 40th Schladming Winter School on ``Dense Matter'', 47 pages, 11 figures, LATeX2e; v2: 1 footnote and 6 references added