Inspired by recent progress on classical limits of scattering amplitudes, we show that hard thermal loops can be obtained from classical limits of off-shell currents. The classicality of hard thermal loops is made manifest by associating classical wavenumbers to soft particles. We compute the classical limit of these currents in QED, QCD and gravity. Our proposal does not involve the introduction of ghosts.
In this paper, we extend our earlier one loop analysis to two loops and give a simple diagrammatic description for the retarded Greens functions at finite temperature, in terms of forward scattering amplitudes of on-shell thermal particles. We present a simple discussion, which can be easily generalized to any field theory, of the temperature dependent parts of the retarded two and three point functions in scalar field theory and QED. As an application of our result at two loops, we show how the infrared singularities in the thermal part of the retarded photon self-energy, cancel in QED_2 in t…
We calculate a class of polarized fermion string scattering amplitudes (PFSSA) at arbitrary mass levels. We discover that, in the hard scattering limit, the functional forms of the non-vanishing PFSSA at each fixed mass level are independent of the choices of spin polarizations. This result justifies and extends Gross conjecture on high energy string scattering amplitudes to the fermionic sector. In addition, this peculiar property of hard PFSSA is to be compared with the usual spin polarization dependence of the hard polarized fermion field theory scatterings.
We extend our previous work on scattering amplitudes [1] to hadron collisions. We provide a general formalism for the computation of eikonal amplitudes squared for the radiation of soft and energy-ordered gluons off three hard-legs at finite-N$_c$ to any order in the perturbative expansion. Examples of three-hard legs processes include vector/Higgs boson production in association with a single hard jet and dijet production in DIS. Explicit expressions for the radiation of up to four gluons are provided as an illustration of the formalism.
The generating functional for hard thermal loops in QCD is rewritten in terms of a gauged WZNW action by introducing an auxiliary field. This shows in a simple way that the contribution of hard thermal loops to the energy of the quark-gluon plasma is positive.
We employ the thermal forward scattering amplitudes technique in order to compute the gluon self-energy in a class of temporal gauges. The leading T^2 and the sub-leading ln(T) contributions are obtained for temperatures high compared with the external momentum. The logarithmic contributions have the same structure as the ultraviolet pole terms which occur at zero temperature (we have recently extended this result to the Coulomb gauge). We also show that the prescription poles, characteristic of temporal gauges, do not modify the leading and sub-leading high-temperature behavior. The one-loop …
The generating functional for hard thermal loops in QCD is important in setting up a resummed perturbation theory. I review how this functional is related to the eikonal for a Chern-Simons theory, and using an auxiliary field, to the gauged WZNW-action. The induced current due to hard thermal loops, properly incorporating damping effects, is also briefly discussed. (Invited talk at the Third Worshop on Thermal Field Theories, Banff, Canada, August, 1993.)
The conventional results for hard thermal loops, which are the building blocks of resummed perturbation theory in thermal field theories, have collinear singularities when external momenta are light-like. It is shown that by taking into account asymptotic thermal masses these singularities are removed. The thus improved hard thermal loops can be summarized by compact gauge-invariant effective actions, generalizing the ones found by Taylor and Wong, and by Braaten and Pisarski.
Classical transport theory is employed to analyze the hot quark-gluon plasma at the leading order in the coupling constant. A condition on the (covariantly conserved) color current is obtained. {}From this condition, the generating functional of hard thermal loops with an arbitrary number of soft external bosonic legs can be derived. Our approach, besides being more direct than alternative ones, shows that hard thermal loops are essentially classical.
We consider the hard thermal loops of QCD for a moving quark-gluon plasma. Generalizing from this we suggest a candidate for the magnetic mass term. This term may also be useful in understanding the mass gap of three-dimensional non-Abelian gauge theories.
We extend to a general class of covariant gauges an approach which relates the thermal Green functions to forward scattering amplitudes of thermal particles. A brief discussion of the non-transversality of the thermal gluon polarization tensor is given in this context. This method is then applied to the calculation of the ln(T) contributions associated with general configurations of 2 and 3-point gluon functions. The results are Lorentz covariant and have the same structure as the ultraviolet divergent contributions which occur at zero temperature.
I outline various derivations of the non-Abelian Kubo equation, which governs the response of a quark-gluon plasma to hard thermal perturbations. In the static case, it is proven that gauge theories do not support hard thermal solitons. Explicit solutions are constructed within an SU(2) Ansatz and they are shown to support the general result. The time-dependent problem, i.e., non-Abelian plasma waves, has not been completely solved. We express and motivate the hope that the intimate relations linking the gauge-invariance condition for hard thermal loops to the equation of motion for T=0, topol…
We develop systematically to all orders the forward scattering description for retarded amplitudes in field theories at zero temperature. Subsequently, through the application of the thermal operator, we establish the forward scattering description at finite temperature. We argue that, beyond providing a graphical relation between the zero temperature and the finite temperature amplitudes, this method is calculationally quite useful. As an example, we derive the important features of the one loop retarded gluon self-energy in the hard thermal loop approximation from the corresponding propertie…
The effective action for hard thermal loops in QCD is related to a gauged WZNW theory. Some of the technical issues of this approach are clarified and the Hamiltonian formulation is presented. The two-point correlation function for the induced current in QCD is obtained; some simplifications of the dynamics of the longitudinal modes are also pointed out.
We show that the high temperature limit of the noncommutative thermal Yang-Mills theory can be directly obtained from the Boltzmann transport equation of classical particles. As an illustration of the simplicity of the Boltzmann method, we evaluate the two and the three-point gluon functions in the noncommutative U(N) theory at high temperatures T. These amplitudes are gauge invariant and satisfy simple Ward identities. Using the constraint satisfied at order T^2 by the covariantly conserved current, we construct the hard thermal loop effective action of the noncommutative theory.
The hard thermal loop effective action for Goldstone bosons is deduced by symmetry arguments from the corresponding result for gauge bosons. Pseudoscalar mesons in Chromodynamics and magnons in an antiferromagnet are discussed as special cases, including the hard thermal loop contribution to their scattering.
We study thermodynamic evaporation of Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes in terms of a low energy perturbation theory. A small black hole which is far from the cosmological horizon and observers at the spacelike hypersurface where black hole attraction and expansion of cosmological horizon balance exactly are considered. In the low energy perturbation, scalar field equations are solved in both regions of the hypersurface and scattering amplitudes are derived. And then the desired thermal temperatures from the two horizons are obtained as a ``minimal'' value of the statistical thermal temperat…
Scalar QED is used to study approximations in thermal field theory beyond the Hard Thermal Loop resummation scheme. For this purpose the photon self energy is calculated for external momenta of the order e^2T using Hard Thermal Loop resummed Green functions.
Through the application of the thermal operator to the zero temperature retarded Green's functions, we derive in a simple way the well known hard thermal effective action in QCD. By relating these functions to forward scattering amplitudes for on-shell particles, this derivation also clarifies the origin of important properties of the hard thermal effective action, such as the manifest Lorentz and gauge invariance of its integrand.
First, we investigate the static non-Abelian Kubo equation. We prove that it does not possess finite energy solutions; thereby we establish that gauge theories do not support hard thermal solitons. A similar argument shows that "static" instantons are absent. In addition, we note that the static equations reproduce the expected screening of the non-Abelian electric field by a gauge invariant Debye mass m=gT sqrt((N+N_F/2)/3). Second, we derive the non-Abelian Kubo equation from the composite effective action. This is achieved by showing that the requirement of stationarity of the composite eff…
We study the behaviour of the two- and three-point thermal Green functions, to one loop order in noncommutative U(N) Yang-Mills theory, at temperatures $T$ much higher than the external momenta $p$. We evaluate the amplitudes for small and large values of the variable $θp T$ ($θ$ is the noncommutative parameter) and exactly compute the static gluon self-energy for all values of $θp T$. We show that these gluon functions, which have a leading $T^2$ behaviour, are gauge independent and obey simple Ward identities. We argue that these properties, together with the results for the lowest order amp…
Classical transport theory for colored particles is investigated and employed to derive the hard thermal loops of QCD. A formal construction of phase-space for color degrees of freedom is presented. The gauge invariance of the non-Abelian Vlasov equations is verified and used as a guiding principle in our approximation scheme.We then derive the generating functional of hard thermal loops from a constraint satisfied at leading-order by the color current. This derivation is more direct than alternative ones based on perturbative quantum field theory, and shows that hard thermal effects in hot QC…
We apply the previously proposed scheme of approximately self-consistent hard-thermal-loop resummations in the entropy of high-temperature QCD to N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theories and compare with a (uniquely determined) R[4,4] Padé approximant that interpolates accurately between the known perturbative result and the next-to-leading order strong-coupling result obtained from AdS/CFT correspondence. We find good agreement up to couplings where the entropy has dropped to about 85% of the Stefan-Boltzmann value. This is precisely the regime which in purely gluonic QCD corresponds to t…
We discuss the high temperature behavior of retarded thermal loops in static external fields. We employ an analytic continuation of the imaginary time formalism and use a spectral representation of the thermal amplitudes. We show that, to all orders, the leading contributions of static hard thermal loops can be directly obtained by evaluating them at zero external energies and momenta.
We study, in the imaginary-time formalism, the high temperature behavior of n-point thermal loops in static Yang-Mills and gravitational fields. We show that in this regime, any hard thermal loop gives the same leading contribution as the one obtained by evaluating the loop at zero external energies and momenta.
We examine, through a Boltzmann equation approach, the generating action of hard thermal loops in the background of gravitational fields. Using the gauge and Weyl invariance of the theory at high temperature, we derive an explicit closed-form expression for the effective action.
We study, in the long wave-length and static limits, the structure of the n-point graviton functions at high temperature. Using the gauge and Weyl invariance of the theory, we derive a simple expression for the hard thermal amplitudes in these two limits.
I review recent developments in QCD thermodynamics and collective excitations from the hard-thermal-loop effective theory. I begin by motivating the discussion with open questions from heavy-ion collisions. I then discuss a finite-temperature and -density calculation of QCD thermodynamics at NNLO from the hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory. Finally I discuss a recent exploration of generalizing the hard-thermal-loop framework to the (chromo)magnetic scale $g^2T$, from which a novel massless mode is uncovered.
We find a closed-form for the distribution function (defined in terms of a Wigner operator) for hot coloured particles in a background gluon field, in the hard thermal loop approximation. We verify that the current is the same as that derived from the known effective action.
Dispersion relations for fermions at high temperature and in a background magnetic field are calculated in two different ways. First from a straightforward one-loop calculation where, in the weak field limit, we find an expression closely related to the standard dispersion relations in the absence of the magnetic field. Secondly, we derive the dispersion relations directly from the Hard Thermal Loop effective action, which allows for an exact solution (i.e. to all orders in the external field), up to the last numerical integrals.
We use the background field method along with a special gauge condition, to derive the hard thermal loop effective action in a simple manner. The new point in the paper is to relate the effective action explicitly to the S-matrix from the onset.
We discover new hard string scattering amplitudes (HSSA) with polarizations orthogonal to the scattering plane in the NS sector of 10D open superstring theory. The corresponding HSSA in the bosonic string theory are of subleading order in energy. In addition, all HSSA are found to be proportional to each other and the ratios among these HSSA are calculated to justify Gross conjecture in 1988 on high energy symmetry of string theory. Moreover, together with these new HSSA, the total number of HSSA calculated in the first massive level of NS sector are found to agree with those of hard polarized…
In this paper, we give a simple diagrammatic identification of the unique combination of the causal n-point vertex functions in the real time formalism that would coincide with the corresponding functions obtained in the imaginary time formalism. Furthermore, we give a simple calculational method for evaluating the temperature dependent parts of the retarded vertex functions, to one loop, by identifying them with the forward scattering amplitudes of on-shell thermal particles. As an application of the method, we calculate and show that the temperature dependent parts of all the retarded functi…
We derive a closed form expression for the long wavelength limit of the effective action for hard thermal loops in an external gravitational field. It is a function of the metric, independent of time derivatives. It is compared and contrasted with the static limit, and with the corresponding limits in an external Yang-Mills field.
We derive the properties of hard thermal effective actions in gauge theories from the point of view of Schwinger's proper time formulation. This analysis is simplified by introducing a set of generalized energy and momenta which are conserved and are non-local in general. These constants of motion, which embody energy-momentum exchanges between the fields and the particles along their trajectories, can be related to a class of gauge invariant or covariant potentials in the hard thermal regime. We show that in this regime the generalized energy, which is non-local in general, generates the rele…
We investigate the use of the hard thermal loop (HTL) resummation technique in non-equilibrium field theory. We use the Keldysh representation of the real time formalism (RTF). We derive the HTL photon self energy and the resummed photon propagator. We show that no pinch singularities appear in the non-equilibrium HTL effective propagator. We discuss a possible regularization mechanism for these singularities at higher orders. As an example of the application of the HTL resummation method within the RTF we discuss the damping rate of a hard electron.
We consider finite temperature 1-loop diagrams with hard loop momenta and an arbitrary number of external gauge fields when the external momenta are either soft, or near the light cone and nearly collinear with the loop momentum. We obtain a recursion relation for these diagrams which we translate into an equation for their generating functional. By integrating out the soft fields while keeping two collinear ones we find an integral equation, originally due to Arnold, Moore, and Yaffe, which sums the bremsstrahlung and pair annihilation contribution to the thermal photon production rate.
We derive a closed-form result for the leading thermal contributions which appear in the n-dimensional phi3 theory at high temperature. These contributions become local only in the long wavelength and in the static limits, being given by different expressions in these two limits.
Thermal amplitudes with ultrasoft momenta, which are not accessible by standard methods of perturbation theory, have recently attracted a lot of interest. However, the comparison of external momenta with the ultrasoft scale $g^2T\ln(1/g)$ is a too crude criterion, since amplitudes with hard external momenta can also be non perturbative, if these momenta are close enough to the light-cone. In this letter, I give a more refined criterion to decide if an amplitude is non perturbative, that applies to all situations. In physical terms, this condition states that non-perturbative effects appear if …
We use an auxiliary field construction to discuss the hard thermal loop effective action associated with massless thermal SU(N) QCD interacting with a weak gravitational field. It is demonstrated that the previous attempt to derive this effective action has only been partially successful and that it is presently only known to first order in the graviton coupling constant. This is still sufficient to enable a calculation of a symmetric traceless quark gluon plasma energy momentum tensor. Finally, we comment on the conserved currents and charges of the derived energy momentum tensor.
We study the realization of dimensional reduction and the validity of the hard thermal loop expansion for lambda phi^4 theory at finite temperature, using an environmentally friendly finite-temperature renormalization group with a fiducial temperature as flow parameter. The one-loop renormalization group allows for a consistent description of the system at low and high temperatures, and in particular of the phase transition. The main results are that dimensional reduction applies, apart from a range of temperatures around the phase transition, at high temperatures (compared to the zero tempera…
We derive the hard thermal loop action for soft electromagnetic fields in the finite temperature world-line formulation at imaginary time, by first integrating out the hard fermion modes from the microscopic QED action. Further, using the finite T world-line method, we calculate all static higher order terms in the soft electromagnetic field. At high T, the leading non-linear terms are independent of the temperature and, except for a term quartic in the time component of the vector potential, they cancel exactly against the vacuum contribution. The remaining T-dependent non-linear terms become…
We consider the model of hard dimers coupled to two-dimensional Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT) with all dimer types present and solve it exactly subject to a single restriction. Depending on the dimer weights there are, in addition to the usual gravity phase of CDT, two tri-critical and two dense dimer phases. We establish the properties of these phases, computing their cylinder and disk amplitudes, and their scaling limits.
We calculate the thermal partition function of DLCQ superstring on the maximally supersymmetric pp-wave background, which is realized as the Penrose limit of orbifolded $AdS_5\times S^5$ and known to be dual to the $\mathcal{N}=2$ ``large'' quiver gauge theory as shown by S. Mukhi, M. Rangamani and E. Verlinde, hep-th/0204147. Making use of the path-integral technique, we derive the manifestly modular invariant expression and show the equivalence with the free energy of second quantized free superstring on this background. The ``virtual strings'' wound around the temporal circle play essential…
We compute the thermo-magnetic correction to the quark-gluon vertex in the presence of a weak magnetic field within the Hard Thermal Loop approximation. The vertex satisfies a QED-like Ward identity with the quark self-energy. The only vertex components that get modified are the longitudinal ones. The calculation provides a first principles result for the quark anomalous magnetic moment at high temperature in a weak magnetic field. We extract the effective thermo-magnetic quark-gluon coupling and show that this decreases as a function of the field strength. The result supports the idea that th…
We consider the issue of thermalization in the D1D5 CFT. Thermalization is expected to correspond to the formation of a black hole in the dual gravity theory. We start from the orbifold point, where the theory is essentially free, and does not thermalize. In earlier work it was noted that there was no clear thermalization effect when the theory was deformed off the orbifold point to first order in the relevant twist perturbation. In this paper we consider the deformation to second order in the twist, where we do find effects that can cause thermalization of an initial perturbation. We consider…
Black Hole Thermodynamics Meets On-Shell Amplitudes: Local Detailed Balance and Thermal Spectrum from Spin Universality and Unitarity
Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Plymouth University（普利茅斯大学数学科学中心）；Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学物理与天文学学院希格斯理论物理中心）；Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University（埼玉大学理工学研究科）；Center for Gravitational Physics and Quantum Information, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University（京都大学汤川理论物理中心引力物理与量子信息研究中心）；Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo（东京大学理学研究科物理学系）；Research Center for the Early Universe (RESCEU), Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo（东京大学理学研究科宇宙早期宇宙研究中心）；Kavli IPMU (WPI), UTIAS, The University of Tokyo（东京大学卡弗里宇宙起源研究所（世界顶级研究中心））；Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo（东京大学大学院综合文化研究科）
