Soft photon propagation in a hot and dense medium to next-to-leading order

Abstract

We present the first complete calculation of the soft photon self-energy to the next-to-leading order in a hot and/or dense ultrarelativistic plasma in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). The calculation is performed within the real-time formalism utilizing dimensional regularization in $4-2\epsilon$ dimensions, while the result is reported including explicit $O(\epsilon )$ terms in the zero-temperature limit. This information is required to extend the perturbative calculation of the pressure of cold and dense QED matter to partial next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in a weak-coupling expansion, reported in a companion paper. These results pave the way for a similar future calculation in Quantum Chromodynamics.

46 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Soft interactions in cold quark matter
• Cold quark matter at N3LO: soft contributions
• The leading non-perturbative coefficient in the weak-coupling expansion of hot QCD pressure
• Two-loop thermal spectral functions with general kinematics
• Hard thermal loops in the real-time formalism
• Degenerate fermionic matter at N${}^3$LO: Quantum Electrodynamics

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Equation of State of Cold Quark Matter to $O({\alpha }_s^3\ln {\alpha }_s)$
• Degenerate fermionic matter at N${}^3$LO: Quantum Electrodynamics
• Soft gluon self-energy at finite temperature and density: hard NLO corrections in general covariant gauge
• Two-loop hard thermal loops for any model
• NLO quark self-energy and dispersion relation using the hard thermal loop resummation
• Accounting for plasma constituent mass effects in heavy fermion energy loss calculations in hot QED and QCD
• Power corrections to the photon polarization tensor in a hot and dense medium of massive fermions
• Momentum expansions in finite-density perturbative calculations