QCD Thermodynamics at Intermediate Coupling

Abstract

The weak-coupling expansion of the QCD free energy is known to order g_s^6log{g_s}, however, the resulting series is poorly convergent at phenomenologically relevant temperatures. In this proceedings, I discuss hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory (HTLpt) which is a gauge-invariant reorganization of the perturbative expansion for gauge theories. I review a recent NNLO HTLpt calculation of QCD thermodynamic functions. I show that the NNLO HTLpt results are consistent with lattice data down to temperatures T~2T_c.

3 pages, 2 figures; talk given at the conference "Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum IX", August 30 - September 3, 2010, Madrid, Spain; to appear in the AIP proceedings