Hard-thermal-loop QCD Thermodynamics

Understand

Naively resummed perturbative approximations to the thermodynamic functions of QCD do not converge at phenomenologically relevant temperatures.

• Here we review recent results of a three-loop hard-thermal-loop perturbation theory calculation of the thermodynamic functions of a quark-gluon plasma for general N_c and N_f.
• We show comparisons of our recent results with lattice data from both the hotQCD and Wuppertal-Budapest groups.
• We demonstrate that the three-loop hard-thermal-loop perturbation result for QCD thermodynamics agrees with lattice data down to temperatures T ~ 2 T_c.