Abstract
At high baryon chemical potential , the equation of state of QCD allows a weak-coupling expansion in the QCD coupling . The result is currently known up to and including the full next-to-next-to-leading order . Starting at this order, the computations are complicated by the modification of particle propagation in a dense medium, which necessitates nonperturbative treatment of the scale . We apply a hard-thermal-loop scheme for capturing the contributions of this scale to the weak-coupling expansion, and we use it to determine the leading-logarithm contribution to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order: . This result is the first improvement to the equation of state of massless cold quark matter in 40 years. The new term is negligibly small and thus significantly increases our confidence in the applicability of the weak-coupling expansion.
- Received 20 July 2018
- Revised 27 September 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.202701
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society