Massive renormalization scheme and perturbation theory at finite temperature

Abstract

We argue that the choice of an appropriate, massive, renormalization scheme can greatly improve the apparent convergence of perturbation theory at finite temperature. This is illustrated by the calculation of the pressure of a scalar field theory with quartic interactions, at 2-loop order. The result, almost identical to that obtained with more sophisticated resummation techniques, shows a remarkable stability as the coupling constant grows, in sharp contrast with standard perturbation theory.