HTL effective action of topologically massive gluons in 3+1 dimensions

Abstract

We construct an effective action for "soft" gluons by integrating out hard thermal modes of topologically massive vector bosons at one loop order. The loop carrying hard gluons (momentum $\sim T$) are known as hard thermal loop (HTL). The gluons are massive in the non-Abelian topologically massive model (TMM) due to a quadratic coupling $B\wedge F$ where a 2-form field $B$ is coupled quadratically with the field strength $F$ of Yang-Mills (YM) field. The mass of the gluons plays an important role in the perturbative analysis of thermal field theory. Due to the presence of this infrared cut-off in the model, the color diffusion constant and conductivity can be analyzed in perturbative regime.