HTL quasiparticle picture of the thermodynamics of QCD

Starting from a nonperturbative expression for entropy and density obtained from $\Phi$-derivable two-loop approximations to the thermodynamic potential, a quasiparticle model for the thermodynamics of QCD can be developed which incorporates the physics of hard thermal loops and leads to a reorganization of the otherwise ill-behaved thermal perturbation theory through order $\alpha_s^{3/2}$. Some details of this reorganization are discussed and the differences to simpler quasiparticle models highlighted. A comparison with available lattice data shows remarkable agreement down to temperatures of $\sim 2.5 T_c$.Comment: Talk given at the International Conference on Statistical QCD, Bielefeld, Germany, August 26--30, 2001. 10 pages LATEX, 7 figure

Anomalous specific heat in ultradegenerate QED and QCD

We discuss the origin of the anomalous $T\ln T^{-1}$ behavior of the low-temperature entropy and specific heat in ultradegenerate QED and QCD and report on a recent calculation which is complete to leading order in the coupling and which contains an infinite series of anomalous terms involving also fractional powers in $T$. This result involves dynamical hard-dense-loop resummation and interpolates between Debye screening effects at larger temperatures and non-Fermi-liquid behavior from only dynamically screened magnetic fields at low temperature.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, contribution to the Proceedings of Strong and Electroweak Matter 2004 (SEWM04), Helsinki, Finland, 16-19 Jun 200

Frozen ghosts in thermal gauge field theory

We review an alternative formulation of gauge field theories at finite temperature where unphysical degrees of freedom of gauge fields and the Faddeev-Popov ghosts are kept at zero temperature.Comment: 6 page

No saturation of the quantum Bogomolnyi bound by two-dimensional supersymmetric solitons

We reanalyse the question whether the quantum Bogomolnyi bound is saturated in the two-dimensional supersymmetric kink and sine-Gordon models. Our starting point is the usual expression for the one-loop correction to the mass of a soliton in terms of sums over zero-point energies. To regulate these sums, most authors put the system in a box with suitable boundary conditions, and impose an ultraviolet cut-off. We distinguish between an energy cut-off and a mode number cut-off, and show that they lead to different results. We claim that only the mode cut-off yields correct results, and only if one considers exactly the same number of bosonic and fermionic modes in the total sum over bound-state and zero-point energies. To substantiate this claim, we show that in the sine-Gordon model only the mode cut-off yields a result for the quantum soliton mass that is consistent with the exact result for the spectrum as obtained by Dashen et al. from quantising the so-called breather solution. In the supersymmetric case, our conclusion is that contrary to previous claims the quantum Bogomolnyi bound is not saturated in any of the two-dimensional models considered.Comment: 23 pages, LATe