Two-loop perturbative corrections to the thermal effective potential in gluodynamics

Understand

The thermodynamics of pure glue theories can be described in terms of an effective action for the Polyakov loop.

• This effective action is of the Landau-Ginzburg type and its variables are the angles parametrizing the loop.
• In this paper we compute perturbative corrections to this action.
• Remarkably, two-loop corrections turn out to be proportional to the one-loop action, independent of the eigenvalues of the loop.