Quark number susceptibility in hard thermal loop approximation

Abstract.

We calculate the quark number susceptibility in the deconfined phase of QCD using the hard thermal loop (HTL) approximation for the quark propagator and quark–meson vertices. This improved perturbation theory takes into account important medium effects such as thermal quark masses and Landau damping in the quark–gluon plasma. We explicitly show that the Landau damping part in the quark propagator for space-like quark momenta does not contribute to the quark number susceptibility due to the quark number conservation. We find that the quark number susceptibility only due to the collective quark modes deviates from the free one around the critical temperature but approaches free results in the infinite temperature limit. The results are in conformity with recent lattice calculations.