Some recent advances in the understanding of ${\cal N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills thermodynamics

Abstract

The interest in the thermodynamics of supersymmetric Yang-Mills started after Maldacena proposed the duality between string theory on AdS backgrounds and the large-N limit of SYM theories. One of the motivations to study the thermal properties of ${\cal N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills in four dimensions is that at high temperatures, the weak-coupling limit of this theory has many similarities with high temperature quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In this proceedings contribution, I review recent work with my collaborators where we calculate the resummed perturbative free energy of ${\cal N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills in four spacetime dimensions through second order in the 't Hooft coupling $\lambda$ at finite temperature and zero chemical potential. We compare our final result with prior results obtained in the weak- and strong-coupling limits and construct a generalized Pad\'{e} approximant that interpolates between the weak-coupling result and the large-$N_c$ strong-coupling result.