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Massless Mode and Positivity Violation in Hot QCD

We calculate the quark self-energy at one-loop level at high temperature, taking into account contributions from both the (chromo)electric scale $gT$ and the (chromo)magnetic scale $g^2T$. While reproducing standard massive excitations due to the electric scale, we uncover a novel massless excitation ascribable to the magnetic scale. The residue of this massless excitation is nonpositive at all temperatures, which consequently gives rise to positivity violation in the quark spectral functions. This demonstrates the profound impact of confinement effects on thermal quark collective excitations, which manifest genuine long-range correlations in the system.