Transport coefficients in large Nf gauge theory: testing hard thermal loops

We compute shear viscosity and flavor diffusion coefficients for ultra-relativistic gauge theory with many fermionic species, Nf>>1, to leading order in 1/Nf. The calculation is performed both at leading order in the effective coupling strength g2Nf, using the Hard Thermal Loop (HTL) approximation, and completely to all orders in g2Nf. This constitutes a nontrivial test of how well the HTL approximation works. We find that in this context, the HTL approximation works well wherever the renormalization point sensitivity of the leading order HTL result is small. (author)