1.Introduction
The properties of strongly interacting matter immersed in a magnetized medium have been the subject of intense research over the last years. The motivation for this activity stems from several fronts: On the one hand, lattice QCD (LQCD) [1] has shown that for temperatures above the chiral restoration pseudo-critical temperature, the quark-antiquark condensate decreases and that this temperature itself also decreases, both as functions of the field intensity. This result, dubbed inverse magnetic catalysis (IMC), has sparked a large number of explanations [2-13]. On the other hand, it has been argued that intense magnetic fields can be produced in peripheral heavy-ion collisions. Possible signatures of the presence of such fields in the interaction region can be the chiral magnetic effect [14] or the enhanced production of prompt photons [15-18]. Moreover, magnetic fields can have an impact on the properties of compact astrophysical objects, such as neutron stars [19].
The dispersive properties for gluons propagating in a magnetized medium are encoded in the gluon polarization tensor. For QED, this tensor has been computed and extensively studied both at zero and finite temperature [20-22, 25-30]. In particular, Refs. [25-27] study the case of intense magnetic fields, where the lowest Landau Level (LLL) approximation can be used. Reference [28] works the one-loop zero temperature case to all orders in the magnetic field and finds a general expression in terms of an integral over proper time parameters. No attempt to provide analytical results is made. In Ref.[29] the polarization tensor is computed both at finite temperature and field strength. The findings are applied to study magnetic field effects on the Debye screening. Reference [31] expresses the one-loop polarization tensor as a sum over Landau levels and evaluates it using numerical methods. An analytical approach to the sum over Landau levels at zero temperature has been recently carried out in Ref.[32]. Magnetic corrections to the QCD equation of state in the hard thermal loop (HTL) and the LLL approximations, applied to the description of heavy-ion collisions have been considered in Refs.[33, 34]. Analytic results can be obtained in several limits of interest such as the HTL and LLL by considering different hierarchies for the fermion mass, thermal and magnetic scales [27, 35].
Nevertheless, in a thermo-magnetic medium, the gluon polarization tensor depends, in
addition to the temperature
In Sec. 3 we summarize and discuss our results. We reserve for the appendices the calculation details for each of the regimes where the gluon polarization tensor is computed.
2.Thermo-magnetic gluon polarization tensor
We proceed to compute the gluon polarization tensor at one-loop order in the presence
of a magnetic field, both in vacuum and in a thermal bath. In both cases we consider
that the largest of all energy scales is the field strength. As we proceed to show,
for the vacuum case, there is no need to establish a hierarchy of scales between the
gluon momentum squared
In general, the one-loop contribution to the gluon polarization tensor, depicted in Fig. 1 is given by
The factor 1/2 accounts for the symmetry factor, which in the presence of the
external magnetic field comes about given that the two contributing diagrams in
Fig. 2, with the opposite flow of charge,
are not equivalent. Also,
where
where
such that
Gauge invariance requires that the gluon polarization tensor be transverse. However,
the breaking of Lorentz symmetry makes this tensor to split into three transverse
structures, such that the gluon polarization tensor can be written, omitting a
trivial factor
where
Notice that the three tensor structures in Eq. (7) are orthogonal to each other, hence, their coefficients in Eq. (6) can be expressed as
We now proceed to compute each of the coefficients in Eq. (8) in the strong field limit.
2.1.Vacuum case, strong field approximation
We now proceed to calculate the polarization tensor in the strong field limit,
namely
where
Figure 2 shows the diagrams contributing to
the calculation. These represent one and the other possible electric charge flow
direction within the loop, which, in the presence of the magnetic field have
both to be accounted for. Using Eq. (9), into the Eq. (1), the explicit
expression for diagram
The contribution from diagram
The explicit expressions for the traces are given by
Substituting Eqs. (10) and (13) into Eq. (12), we obtain
After integrating over the transverse components of the four-momentum, the expression for the polarization tensor becomes
In order to compute the two dimensional integral over the parallel components, we use Feynman’s parametrization. Thus, the denominator in Eq. (15) is written as
with
where in the integrand we have already discarded linear terms in
Using these into Eq. (17), we get
Equation (19) is apparently divergent when taking the limit
Substituting Eq. (20) into Eq. (19), we get
Notice that Eq. (21) is now free of divergences when taking the limit
from where it is seen that the emerging tensor structure is equal to
The integral over the
where
This result coincides (albeit for the case of the photon polarization tensor)
with the one found in Ref.[25]
(see also Refs.[26][32]). Figure 3 shows the behavior of the function
2.2.Thermo-magnetic polarization tensor in the HTL and LLL approximations
We now proceed to calculate the polarization tensor in the strong field limit
within the HTL approximation. We consider the case where
with
where, in the medium’s reference frame,
Notice that when working in the LLL, one can expect that the tensor structures in
Eq. (26), together with
The above discussion applies to the situation where the thermo-magnetic system is
not undergoing a collective motion characterized by a non-trivial medium’s flow
velocity
Concentrating only on the temperature dependent part of the polarization tensor
To find the coefficients
In order to compute the contractions on the left-hand side of Eq. (28), we follow a procedure similar to the one that lead to Eq. (15). This implies using that, in the strong field limit, transverse and parallel structures factorize, and also that temperature effects are obtained, in the Matsubara formalism, from the time-like component of the integration four-vector. Therefore all temperature effects are comprised to the parallel pieces of the integrals. Explicitly, within the Matsubara formalism, we transform the integrals to Euclidean space by means of a Wick rotation, namely
where the integral over the time-like component of the fermion momentum has been
discretized and we introduced the fermion Matsubara frequencies
2.2.1.Case where
When the external momentum
and
The explicit calculations to obtain Eqs. (30) and (31) are shown in Appendix B. Notice that knowledge of the complete expression is important when discussing their evolution properties under the renormalization group [38] and for the study of the thermo-magnetic effects on the Debye mass .
2.2.2.Case where
Another way to compute the polarization tensor in the HTL approximation is to
take into account the complementary hierarchy of scales
and
The explicit calculations to obtain Eqs. (32) and (33) are shown in Appendix
C. For this hierarchy of scales, we have already considered the massless
limit
2.2.3.Magnetic corrections to the gluon Debye mass
If we now keep the fermion mass finite and work with the premises spelled out
in Subsec. 2.2.1, we can consider the matter contribution of Eqs. (30) and
(31) to the dispersion relation. For this purpose, we need to take the limit
when the three-momentum goes to zero. Nevertheless, notice that the result
may be different depending on whether the parallel or perpendicular momentum
component, with respect to the magnetic field, is taken first to zero. This
behaviour is due to the breaking of the spatial isotropy and is the analog
to the purely thermal case, where the limits when either
Notice that the behavior of
for
•
which shows that transverse modes are not screened. If we now take
•
If we now take
whereas the longitudinal one is not screened. Notice that the right-hand side of this expression coincides with the Debye mass for the longitudinal mode in the previous case given by Eq. (38).
•
In this last case, Eqs. (34) and (35) become
and both the longitudinal and transverse modes develop a Debye mass given by
Notice that when
For the three cases,
We emphasize that the thermo-magnetic contribution to the polarization tensor
can be expressed using only the orthogonal tensors
3.Summary and discussion
In this work we have computed the gluon polarization tensor in a thermo-magnetic medium. The computation has been performed including the magnetic field effects by means of Schwinger’s proper time method. Although the vacuum polarization tensor for gauge fields has been previously studied in several other works (see for example Refs.[20-22, 25, 28, 29]), here we have analytically studied in detail the strong field limit at zero and high temperature. The latter case has been implemented within the HTL approximation.
For the
For large
We analyzed the coefficients of the two tensor structures that appear at finite
temperature and magnetic field and considered the cases