On the Perturbative Evaluation of Thermal Green's Functions in the Bulk and Shear Channels of Yang-Mills Theory

Abstract

In this PhD thesis, I will review recent progress in perturbative studies of energy momentum tensor correlators in high-temperature Yang-Mills theory. After briefly introducing the necessary tools and physical motivation, I proceed to discuss the machinery developed for the extraction of next-to-leading order Operator Product Expansions and thermal spectral functions and to introduce the results obtained in the bulk and shear channels of Yang-Mills theory. Particular emphasis is placed on the comparison of the results with recent lattice and gauge/gravity calculations, as well as on discussing their use in extracting the corresponding transport coefficients from Euclidean lattice data.