Abstract
The hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory (HTLpt) framework is used to calculate the thermodynamic functions of a quark-gluon plasma to three-loop order. This is the highest order accessible by finite temperature perturbation theory applied to a non-Abelian gauge theory before the high-temperature infrared catastrophe. All ultraviolet divergences are eliminated by renormalization of the vacuum, the HTL mass parameters, and the strong coupling constant. After choosing a prescription for the mass parameters, the three-loop results for the pressure and trace anomaly are found to be in very good agreement with recent lattice data down to T ~ 2 − 3T c , which are temperatures accessible by current and forthcoming heavy-ion collision experiments.
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Andersen, J.O., Leganger, L.E., Strickland, M. et al. Three-loop HTL QCD thermodynamics. J. High Energ. Phys. 2011, 53 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2011)053
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2011)053