Power corrections to the HTL effective Lagrangian of QED

Abstract

We present compact expressions for the power corrections to the hard thermal loop (HTL) Lagrangian of QED in d space dimensions. These are corrections of order (L/T)2, valid for momenta L≪T, where T is the temperature. In the limit d→3 we achieve a consistent regularization of both infrared and ultraviolet divergences, which respects the gauge symmetry of the theory. Dimensional regularization also allows us to witness subtle cancellations of infrared divergences. We also discuss how to generalize our results in the presence of a chemical potential, so as to obtain the power corrections to the hard dense loop (HDL) Lagrangian.