Gauge-independent resummed gluon self-energy in hot QCD Original Research Article

The pinch technique (PT) is applied to obtain the gauge-independent resummed gluon self-energy in a hot Yang-Mills gas. Calculation is performed at one-loop level in linear gauges which preserve rotational invariance and the resummed propagators and vertices are used. The effective gluon self-energy, which is obtained as the sum of the resummed gluon self-energy and the resummed pinch contributions, is not only gauge-independent but also satisfies the transversality relation. Using this gauge-independent effective gluon self-energy, we calculate the damping rate for transverse gluons in the leading order and show that the result coincides with the one obtained by Braaten and Pisarski.