Hard thermal loops and the entropy of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories

Nov, 2006
5 pages
Published in:
  • JHEP 06 (2007) 035
e-Print:
Report number:
  • ECT-06-22,
  • SPHT-T06-163,
  • TUW-06-07

Citations per year

2006201120162021202401234567
Abstract:
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] Pad\'e 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 temperatures above 2.5 times the deconfinement temperature and for which this method of hard-thermal-loop resummation has given similar good agreement with lattice QCD results. This suggests that in this regime the entropy of both QCD and N=4 SYM is dominated by effectively weakly coupled hard-thermal-loop quasiparticle degrees of freedom. In N=4 SYM, strong-coupling contributions to the thermodynamic potential take over when the entropy drops below 85% of the Stefan-Boltzmann value.
  • 11.15.Pg
  • 11.30.Pb
  • 11.10.Wx
  • 12.38.Mh
  • field theory: conformal
  • entropy: density
  • gauge field theory: Yang-Mills
  • quantum chromodynamics
  • space-time: anti-de Sitter
  • quasiparticle