The quark contribution to the free energy of a hot quark-gluon plasma is calculated to leading order in hard-thermal-loop (HTL) perturbation theory. This method selectively resums higher order corrections associated with plasma effects, such as screening, quasiparticles, and Landau damping. Comparing to the weak-coupling expansion of QCD, the error in the one-loop HTL free energy is of order ${\alpha }_s,$ but the large ${\alpha }_s^{3/2}$ correction from QCD plasma effects is included exactly.

• Received 11 August 1999

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.61.074016