Speaker
Description
An accurate theoretical description of pressure of cold and dense quark matter is a key ingredient for constraining models of the equation of state of neutron stars at large baryon density. While soft-gluon logarithmic corrections at third order in the strong coupling constant have been obtained recently, the corresponding hard contribution has so far only been evaluated partially.
In this talk, we present a new approach to this outstanding challenge. Using well-established cutting rules, we relate vacuum Feynman integrals at finite baryon chemical potential to on-shell integrals over lower-loop amplitudes at zero chemical potential. In this formulation, the chemical potential solely acts as an upper cut-off on the energy of the on-shell phase space. We explain how the computation of constrained phase-space integrals can be streamlined using methods widely employed in the study of vacuum scattering amplitudes, such as integration-by-parts reduction and differential equations, and illustrate our setup with examples at different loop orders and for both massive and massless quarks.
