Speaker
Description
We review recent progress in describing the equilibrium properties of QCD (and related theories such as Yang-Mills theory) at finite temperature/density from a systematic and controlled small parameter expansion, based on the Curci-Ferrari model. The latter has recently been proposed as a possible extension of the standard but ill-defined Faddeev-Popov action in the Landau gauge. In the case of pure YM, it allows in particular to extend the validity of perturbation theory to the infrared regime. We shall review the predictions of this extended perturbation theory for the phase structure of YM theories and QCD in the formal regime of heavy quark flavors. We shall also discuss some preliminary applications of our framework to the physical QCD case.