Two-loop hard thermal loops for vector bosons in general models

Abstract

Hard thermal loops describe how soft gauge fields are screened and damped in hot plasmas. As such they are used to calculate transport coefficients, Sphaleron rates, equations of state, and particle production. However, most calculations are done using one-loop hard thermal loop self-energies. And two-loop contributions can be large. To that end this paper provides vector two-loop self-energies for generic models: any scalar, fermion, or vector representation; and all possible renormalizable terms. Several examples are given to showcase the results. Two-loop results for higher-point functions are also given.