The propagation of long-wavelength gluons through a dense QCD medium at high baryon chemical potential μB is qualitatively modified by the effects of screening, arising from scatterings off the high-momentum quarks in the medium. This same screening phenomenon also impacts gluons occurring in loop corrections to the pressure of cold quark matter, leading to contributions from the parametric scale αs1/2μB, starting at next-to-next-to-leading order (N2LO) in the strong coupling constant αs. At next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO), interactions between these long-wavelength gluonic modes contribute to the pressure. These interaction corrections have recently been computed in Ref [1, 2], and the inclusion of these interactions slightly improves the convergence of the equation of state of cold quark matter. In these proceedings, we present these results and provide details summarizing how this lengthy calculation was performed.
Soft Interactions in Cold Quark Matter
