English

Three-loop HTL Free Energy for QED

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-10-29 v3 High Energy Physics - Theory Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We calculate the free energy of a hot gas of electrons and photons to three loops using the hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory reorganization of finite-temperature perturbation theory. We calculate the free energy through three loops by expanding in a power series in m_D/T, m_f/T, and e^2, where m_D and m_f are thermal masses and e is the coupling constant. We demonstrate 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 cancellation among various contributions, we obtain a completely analytic result for the resummed thermodynamic potential at three loops. Finally, we compare our result with similar calculations that use the Phi-derivable approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0906.2936,
  title  = {Three-loop HTL Free Energy for QED},
  author = {Jens O. Andersen and Michael Strickland and Nan Su},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0906.2936},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

23 pages, 10 figures; v3 - typos corrected, additional discussions of systematics added; corresponds with published version

R2 v1 2026-07-22T20:51:38.853Z