2014/10/06 by Yannis Burnier, Burnier, Yannis
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-lat #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1410.1304
22 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2014/10/06 · openalex publication_date 2014/10/06 · arxiv updated 2014/10/07 · openalex created_date 2022/10/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The vector channel spectral function at zero spatial momentum is calculated at next-to-leading order in thermal QCD for any quark mass. It corresponds to the imaginary part of the massive quark contribution to the photon polarization tensor. The spectrum shows a well defined transport peak in contrast to both the heavy quark limit studied previously, where the low frequency domain is exponentially suppressed at this order and the naive massless case where it vanishes at leading order and diverges at next-to-leading order. From our general expressions, the massless limit can be taken and we show that no divergences occur if done carefully. Finally, we compare the massless limit to results from lattice simulations.