Non-Abelian Debye screening length beyond leading order.

In quantum electrodynamics, static electric fields are screened at non-zero temperatures by charges in the plasma. The inverse screening length, or Debye mass, may be analyzed in perturbation theory and is of order eT at relativistic temperatures. An analogous situation occurs when non-Abelian gauge theories are studied perturbatively, but the perturbative analysis breaks down when corrections of order e2T are considered. At this order, the Debye mass depends on the non-perturbative physics of confinement, and a perturbative “definition” of the Debye mass as the pole of a gluon propagator does not even make sense. In this work, we show how the Debye mass can be defined nonperturbatively in a manifestly gauge invariant manner (in vector-like gauge theories with zero chemical potential). In addition, we show how the O(e2T ) correction could be determined by a fairly simple, three-dimensional, numerical lattice calculation of the perimeter-law behavior of large, adjoint-charge Wilson loops.