Improved hard-thermal-loop effective action for hot QED and QCD

The conventional results for hard thermal loops, which are the building blocks of resummed perturbation theory in thermal field theories, have collinear singularities when external momenta are light-like. It is shown that by taking into account asymptotic thermal masses these singularities are removed. The thus improved hard thermal loops can be summarized by compact gauge-invariant effective actions, generalizing the ones found by Taylor and Wong, and by Braaten and Pisarski.