Three-loop massive tadpoles and polylogarithms through weight six

We evaluate the three-loop massive vacuum bubble diagrams in terms of polylogarithms up to weight six. We also construct the basis of irrational constants being harmonic polylgarithms of arguments $e^{k i \pi/3}$.Comment: 26 pages, 4 ancillary files, v3: version published in JHEP: minor additions, file with results for massive three-loop form-factor integrals adde

On the bb-quark running mass in QCD and the SM

We consider electroweak corrections to the relation between the running $\overline{\mathrm{MS}}$ mass $m_b$ of the $b$ quark in the five-flavor QCD$\times$QED effective theory and its counterpart in the Standard Model (SM). As a bridge between the two parameters, we use the pole mass $M_b$ of the $b$ quark, which can be calculated in both models. The running mass is not a fundamental parameter of the SM Lagrangian, but the product of the running Yukawa coupling $y_b$ and the Higgs vacuum expectation value. Since there exist different prescriptions to define the latter, the relations considered in the paper involve a certain amount of freedom. All the definitions can be related to each other in perturbation theory. Nevertheless, we argue in favor of a certain gauge-independent prescription and provide a relation which can be directly used to deduce the value of the Yukawa coupling of the $b$ quark at the electroweak scale from its effective QCD running mass. This approach allows one to resum large logarithms $\ln(m_b/M_t)$ systematically. Numerical analysis shows that, indeed, the corrections to the proposed relation are much smaller than those between $y_b$ and $M_b$.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, misprints corrected (thanks to S. Martin), results not affecte

The Boltzmann equation for colourless plasmons in hot QCD plasma. Semiclassical approximation

Within the framework of the semiclassical approximation, we derive the Boltzmann equation describing the dynamics of colorless plasmons in a hot QCD plasma. The probability of the plasmon-plasmon scattering at the leading order in the coupling constant is obtained. This probability is gauge-independent at least in the class of the covariant and temporal gauges. It is noted that the structure of the scattering kernel possesses important qualitative difference from the corresponding one in the Abelian plasma, in spite of the fact that we focused our study on the colorless soft excitations. It is shown that four-plasmon decay is suppressed by the power of $g$ relative to the process of nonlinear scattering of plasmons by thermal particles at the soft momentum scale. It is stated that the former process becomes important in going to the ultrasoft region of the momentum scale.Comment: 41, LaTeX, minor changes, identical to published versio