A brief overview of hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory

Abstract

The poor convergence of quantum field theory at finite temperature has been one of the main obstacles in the practical applications of thermal QCD for decades. Here we briefly review the progress of hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory (HTLpt) in reorganizing the perturbative expansion in order to improve the convergence. The quantum mechanical anharmonic oscillator is used as a simple example to show the breakdown of weak-coupling expansion, and variational perturbation theory is introduced as an effective resummation scheme for divergent weak-coupling expansions. We discuss HTLpt thermodynamic calculations for QED, pure-glue QCD, and QCD with N_f=3 up to three-loop order. The results suggest that HTLpt provides a systematic framework that can be used to calculate both static and dynamic quantities for temperatures relevant at LHC.

20 pages, 11 figures; Review article for the program on "AdS/CFT and Novel Approaches to Hadron and Heavy Ion Physics", October 11 - December 3, 2010, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics China (KITPC), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China. Published version in Communications in Theoretical Physics