Thermodynamic pressure for massless QCD and the trace anomaly

Abstract

From statistical mechanics the trace of the thermal average of any energy-momentum tensor is $\langle T^{\mu}_{\;\;\mu}\rangle =T\partial P/\partial T-4P$. The renormalization group formula $\langle T^{\mu}_{\;\;\mu}\rangle =\beta(g_{M})\partial P/\partial g_{M}$ for QCD with massless fermions requires the pressure to have the structure \begin{equation} P=T^{4}\sum_{n=0}^{\infty} \phi_{n}(g_{M})\big[\ln\big({M\over 4\pi T}\big)\big]^{n},\end{equation} where the factor $4\pi$ is for later convenience. The functions $\phi_{n}(g_{M})$ for $n\ge 1$ may be calculated from $\phi_{0}(g_{M})$ using the recursion relation $n\,\phi_{n}(g_{M})=-\beta(g_{M})d\phi_{n-1}/dg_{M}$. This is checked against known perturbation theory results by using the terms of order $(g_{M})^{2}, (g_{M})^{3}$, $(g_{M})^{4}$ in $\phi_{0}(g_{M})$ to obtain the known terms of order $(g_{M})^{4}, (g_{M})^{5}$, $(g_{M})^{6}$ in $\phi_{1}(g_{M})$ and the known term of order $(g_{M})^{6}$ in $\phi_{2}(g_{M})$. The above series may be summed and gives the same result as choosing $M=4\pi T$, viz. $T^{4}\phi_{0}(g_{4\pi T})$.