The entropy of hot QCD at large N_f: Successfully testing weak coupling techniques

Abstract

It has been known for some time that the entropy of hot QCD is well reproduced by weak coupling techniques. These do not identify with perturbation theory, known to have poor convergence properties, but involve resumming the physics of hard thermal loops in the non-perturbative Phi-derivable two-loop approximation. We test this approximation scheme in the limit of large flavor number (N_f) where the exact result can be calculated for a wide range of couplings for which the influence of the Landau pole is negligible. Using full momentum-dependent fermionic self-energies instead of the previously only known weighted average value to order g^3, the exact result for the entropy can be remarkably well reproduced by the HTL resummed theory for a natural choice of the renormalization scale, and this up to large values of the coupling. This gives confidence in the reliability of weak coupling techniques when applied to the thermodynamics of QCD, at least for temperatures T > 3 T_c.