An infrared singularity in the damping rate for longitudinal gluons in hot QCD

We calculate γl(0), the damping rate for longitudinal on-shell gluons with zero momentum in hot QCD using the hard-thermal-loop scheme, and find it to be divergent in the infrared. We argue that this result suggests that the scheme may be sensitive in this sector and thus may need to be improved upon. We discuss the validity of our result and emphasize the fact that it depends on the way we perform our calculation. In particular, we do not exclude the possibility that alternative approaches that we briefly comment on may in principle yield infrared-safe results.