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New approach to determine the thermodynamics of deconfined matter to high accuracy

Tyler Gorda1,2,*, Pablo Navarrete3,†, Risto Paatelainen3,4,‡, Leon Sandbote3,§, and Kaapo Seppänen3,5,∥

  • *Contact author: gorda.1@osu.edu
  • †Contact author: pablo.navarrete@helsinki.fi
  • ‡Contact author: risto.paatelainen@helsinki.fi
  • §Contact author: leon.sandbote@helsinki.fi
  • ∥Contact author: kaapo.seppaenen@unibe.ch
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 054056 – Published 29 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/wd4z-cqw3

Abstract

We demonstrate that at finite density and sufficiently high temperatures, phase-quenched (PQ) lattice simulations combined with perturbation theory provide a new precision approach to determining the thermodynamics of QCD across a wide arc of the phase diagram where the strong coupling constant αs remains small. In this regime, nonperturbative pairing effects in the PQ theory are parametrically suppressed, so that the difference between the PQ and full QCD pressures becomes a small perturbative correction. We compute this correction up to and including O(αs7/2) using electrostatic QCD together with a novel numerical method to compute four-loop sum-integrals. This enables the determination of the perturbative QCD pressure with precision beyond the current state of the art while including nonperturbative pure-gluonic contributions from the lattice.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 054056– Published 29 September, 2026
  • Received 2 December 2025
  • Accepted 12 August 2026
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