Resumming Long-Distance Contributions to the QCD Pressure

Abstract

The strict coupling constant expansion for the free energy of hot QCD plasma shows bad convergence at all reasonable temperatures, and does not agree well with its 4D lattice determination. This has recently led to various refined resummations, whereby the agreement with the lattice result should improve, at the cost of a loss of a formal agreement with the coupling constant expansion and particularly with its large infrared sensitive "long-distance" contributions. We show here how to resum the dominant long-distance effects by using a 3D effective field theory, and determine their magnitude by simple lattice Monte Carlo simulations.