The nonperturbative contribution to asymptotic masses

In gauge theories, charged particles obey modified dispersion due to medium interactions (forward scattering), leading at high energies E >= T to an asymptotic mass-squared m(infinity)(2). We calculate the infrared part of this mass nonperturbatively for the theory of the strong interactions, QCD, through a lattice treatment of its low-energy effective description, electrostatic QCD. Incorporation of these results into a nonperturbative determination of the effective thermal mass will require a still-incomplete next-to-leading order perturbative matching of this quantity to full QCD.Peer reviewe