arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Y. Schroder.
The Debye mass sets a scale for the screening of static charges and the scattering of fast charges within a gauge plasma. Inspired by its potential cosmological applications, we determine a QCD Debye mass at 2-loop order in a broad temperature range (1 GeV ... 10 TeV), demonstrating how quark mass thresholds get smoothly crossed. Along the way, integration-by-parts identities pertinent to massive loops at finite temperature are illuminated.
We analyze 3-loop contributions to the gauge coupling felt by ultrasoft ("magnetostatic") modes in hot Yang-Mills theory. So-called soft/hard terms, originating from dimension-six operators within the soft effective theory, are shown to cancel 1097/1098 of the IR divergence found in a recent determination of the hard 3-loop contribution to the soft gauge coupling. The remaining 1/1098 originates from ultrasoft/hard contributions, induced by dimension-six operators in the ultrasoft effective theory. Soft 3-loop contributions are likewise computed, and are found to be IR divergent, rendering the ultrasoft gauge coupling non-perturbative at relative order O(alphas^{3/2}). We elaborate on the implications of these findings for effective theory studies of physical observables in thermal QCD.
Recently, the existence of a candidate a-function for renormalisable theories in three dimensions was demonstrated for a general theory at leading order and for a scalar-fermion theory at next-to-leading order. Here we extend this work by constructing the a-function at next-to-leading order for an N=2 supersymmetric Chern-Simons theory. This increase in precision for the a-function necessitated the evaluation of the underlying renormalization-group functions at four loops.
We provide an update on a long-term project that aims at evaluating massive vacuum integrals at the five-loop frontier, with high precision and in various space-time dimensions. A number of applications are sketched, mainly concerning the determination of anomalous dimensions, for quantum field theories in four, three and two dimensions.
We renormalize the SU(N) Gross-Neveu model in the modified minimal subtraction (MSbar) scheme at four loops and determine the beta-function at this order. The theory ceases to be multiplicatively renormalizable when dimensionally regularized due to the generation of evanescent 4-fermi operators. The first of these appears at three loops and we correctly take their effect into account in deriving the renormalization group functions. We use the results to provide estimates of critical exponents relevant to phase transitions in graphene.
We evaluate a new 3-loop sum-integral which contributes to the Debye screening mass in hot QCD. While we manage to derive all divergences analytically, its finite part is mapped onto simple integrals and evaluated numerically.
In order to prepare the ground for evaluating classes of three-loop sum-integrals that are presently needed for thermodynamic observables, we take a fresh and systematic look on the few known cases, and review their evaluation in a unified way using coherent notation. We do this for three important cases of massless bosonic three-loop vacuum sum-integrals that have been frequently used in the literature, and aim for a streamlined exposition as compared to the original evaluations. In passing, we speculate on options for generalization of the computational techniques that have been employed.
We demonstrate the applicability of integration-by-parts (IBP) identities in finite-temperature field theory. As a concrete example, we perform 3-loop computations for the thermodynamic pressure of QCD in general covariant gauges, and confirm earlier Feynman-gauge results.
Electroweak precision measurements, encoded in the oblique parameters, give strong constraints on physics beyond the Standard Model. The oblique parameters S, T, U (V, W, X) are calculated in the next-to-minimal supersymmetric model (NMSSM). We outline the calculation of the oblique parameters in terms of one-loop gauge-boson selfenergies and find sensitive restrictions for the NMSSM parameter space.
Perturbation theory for non-Abelian gauge theories at finite temperature is plagued by infrared divergences caused by magnetic soft modes $\sim g^2T$, which correspond to the fields of a 3d Yang-Mills theory. We revisit a gauge invariant resummation scheme to solve this problem by self-consistent mass generation using an auxiliary scalar field, improving over previous attempts in two respects. First, we generalise earlier SU(2) treatments to SU(N). Second, we obtain a gauge independent two-loop gap equation, correcting an error in the literature. The resulting two-loop approximation to the magnetic mass represents a $\sim 15%$ correction to the leading one-loop value, indicating a reasonable convergence of the resummation.
We consider the next-to-leading order thermal production rate of heavy right-handed neutrinos in the non-relativistic regime m_top < pi*T << M, where m_top refers to the electroweak scale. Rephrasing the problem in an OPE language and making use of different techniques than a previous analysis by Salvio et al, we confirm the general structure of their result and many of the coefficients. We also extend the analysis to the next order in the non-relativistic expansion, thereby revealing the leading non-trivial momentum dependence, as well as to NNLO in couplings, revealing the leading sensitivity to thermal resummations. Our results are expressed as a sum of simple "master" structures, which renders them a suitable starting point for determining the next-to-leading order rate also in the relativistic regime pi*T ~ M.
We determine a next-to-leading order result for the correlator of the shear stress operator in high-temperature Yang-Mills theory. The computation is performed via an ultraviolet expansion, valid in the limit of small distances or large momenta, and the result is used for writing operator product expansions for the Euclidean momentum and coordinate space correlators as well as for the Minkowskian spectral density. In addition, our results enable us to confirm and refine a shear sum rule originally derived by Romatschke, Son and Meyer.
We update Monte Carlo simulations of the three-dimensional SU(3) + adjoint Higgs theory, by extrapolating carefully to the infinite volume and continuum limits, in order to estimate the contribution of the infrared modes to the pressure of hot QCD. The sum of infrared contributions beyond the known 4-loop order turns out to be a smooth function, of a reasonable magnitude and specific sign. Unfortunately, adding this function to the known 4-loop terms does not improve the match to four-dimensional lattice data, in spite of the fact that other quantities, such as correlation lengths, spatial string tension, or quark number susceptibilities, work well within the same setup. We outline possible ways to reduce the mismatch.
In this talk, I present the status of attempts to analyze the behavior of the so-called spatial 't Hooft loop, which can be taken as an order parameter for the deconfinement phase transition in pure SU(N) gauge theory. While lattice data show a strikingly universal scaling of extracted k-string tensions for various values of k and N, the analytic approach to these observables might need some refinement.
The pressure of QCD admits at high temperatures a factorization into purely perturbative contributions from "hard" thermal momenta, and slowly convergent as well as non-perturbative contributions from "soft" thermal momenta. The latter can be related to various effective gluon condensates in a dimensionally reduced effective field theory, and measured there through lattice simulations. Practical measurements of one of the relevant condensates have suffered, however, from difficulties in extrapolating convincingly to the continuum limit. In order to gain insight on this problem, we employ Numerical Stochastic Perturbation Theory to estimate the problematic condensate up to 4-loop order in lattice perturbation theory. Our results seem to confirm the presence of "large" discretization effects, going like $a\ln(1/a)$, where $a$ is the lattice spacing. For definite conclusions, however, it would be helpful to repeat the corresponding part of our study with standard lattice perturbation theory techniques.
In this talk we review the status concerning vacuum integrals needed in perturbative expansions of QCD at non-zero temperature. We will focus on the differences as compared to familiar zero-temperature techniques, and provide a list of known basic master integrals.
Thanks to dimensional reduction, the contributions to the hot QCD pressure coming from so-called soft modes can be studied via an effective three-dimensional theory named Electrostatic QCD (spatial Yang-Mills fields plus an adjoint Higgs scalar). The poor convergence of the perturbative series within EQCD suggests to perform lattice measurements of some of the associated gluon condensates. These turn out, however, to be plagued by large discretization artifacts. We discuss how Numerical Stochastic Perturbation Theory can be exploited to determine the full lattice spacing dependence of one of these condensates up to 4-loop order, and sharpen our tools on a concrete 2-loop example.
Inspired by the corresponding problem in QCD, we determine the pressure of massless O(N) scalar field theory up to order g^6 in the weak-coupling expansion, where g^2 denotes the quartic coupling constant. This necessitates the computation of all 4-loop vacuum graphs at a finite temperature: by making use of methods developed by Arnold and Zhai at 3-loop level, we demonstrate that this task is manageable at least if one restricts to computing the logarithmic terms analytically, while handling the ``constant'' 4-loop contributions numerically. We also inspect the numerical convergence of the weak-coupling expansion after the inclusion of the new terms. Finally, we point out that while the present computation introduces strategies that should be helpful for the full 4-loop computation on the QCD-side, it also highlights the need to develop novel computational techniques, in order to be able to complete this formidable task in a systematic fashion.