Resummation of infrared divergences in the free energy of spin-two fields

Abstract

We derive a closed form expression for the sum of all the infrared divergent contributions to the free-energy of a gas of gravitons. An important ingredient of our calculation is the use of a gauge fixing procedure such that the graviton propagator becomes both traceless and transverse. This has been shown to be possible, in a previous work, using a general gauge fixing procedure, in the context of the lowest order expansion of the Einstein-Hilbert action, describing non-interacting spin two fields. In order to encompass the problems involving thermal loops, such as the resummation of the free-energy, in the present work, we have extended this procedure to the situations when the interactions are taken into account.