Quarkonia at finite temperature in relativistic heavy ion collisions

The behavior of quarkonia in relativistic heavy ion collisions is reviewed. After a detailed discussion of the current theoretical understanding of quarkonia in a static equilibriated plasma, we discuss quarkonia yield from the fireball created in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collision experiments. We end with a brief discussion of the experimental results and outlook.Comment: Review article for Pramana. 17 pages. Discussion in Sec. 2.2 extended, one error corrected, references updated and some typos corrected. Published versio

Scaling and the continuum limit of gluoN_c plasmas

We investigated the finite temperature (T) phase transition for SU(Nc) gauge theory with Nc=4, 6, 8 and 10 at lattice spacing, a, of 1/(6T) or less. We found that these theories have first order transitions at such small a. In many cases we were able to find the critical couplings with precision as good as a few parts in 10^4. We also investigated the use of two-loop renormalization group equations in extrapolating the lattice results to the continuum, thus fixing the temperature scale in units of the phase transition temperature, Tc. We found that when a \le 1/(8Tc) the two-loop extrapolation was accurate to about 1--2%. However, we found that trading Tc for the QCD scale, Lambda_MSbar, increases uncertainties significantly, to the level of about 5--10%.Comment: Small correction

Continuum Thermodynamics of the GluoN_c Plasma

We study the thermodynamics of SU(N_c) pure gauge theories for N_c=3, 4 and 6. The continuum and thermodynamic limits of bulk quantities such as the pressure, energy density and the entropy density are taken by using several different lattice spacings and volumes. There is no window of temperature in which a non-trivial conformal theory describes bulk thermodynamics. We extract the latent heat of the first-order deconfinement phase transitions and observe good scaling with N_c. For all quantities that we measure, strong N_c scaling holds, except, possibly, very close to the transition temperature, T_c; however we are unable to find strong evidence for scaling with the 't Hooft coupling in thermal quantities at the small values of N_c which we study

The Deconfinement Transition in SO(3) Gauge Theory

The SO(3) lattice gauge theory with a Villain form of action was investigated by Monte Carlo techniques on asymmetric lattices with Nt = 2 and 4, where Nt is the number of sites in the temporal extent. Unlike the results for higher Nt, only one transition of second order was found for Nt = 2 . An extended action with an irrelevant term to suppress Z_2 monopoles enabled us to get a better view of the deconfinement transition as the effects of bulk transition could be suppressed as well. Although the action has no global Z_2 symmetry for the SO(3) theory, unlike the SU(2) theory at finite temperature, our study revealed a second order deconfinement transition, with properties similar to the deconfinement transition of SU(2).Comment: 19 pages latex, incl. figure

Zero mode contribution in quarkonium correlators and in-medium properties of heavy quarks

We calculate the low energy contribution to quarkonium correlators in Euclidean time in lattice QCD. This contribution was found to give the dominant source of the temperature dependence of the correlators. We have found that the low energy contribution is well described by a quasi-particle model and have determined the effective temperature dependent heavy quark mass.Comment: Contribution to QM2008, 4 pages, LaTeX, uses iopart.cls, corrected typo

Using Wilson flow to study the SU(3) deconfinement transition

We explore the use of Wilson flow to study the deconfinement transition in SU(3) gauge theory. We use the flowed Polyakov loop as a renormalized order parameter for the transition, and use it to renormalize the Polyakov loop. We also study the flow properties of the electric and magnetic gluon condensates, and demonstrate that the difference of the flowed operators shows rapid change across the transition point.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures. Small changes in figures and discussion, results unchanged. Published versio

Impact of Z_2 monopoles and vortices on the deconfinement transition

The impact of Z_2-monopoles and vortices on the bulk and the deconfinement phase transitions of the SU(2) lattice gauge theory with a mixed Villain form of action is investigated by varying their numbers with appropriate chemical potentials. Suppressing the former shifts the line of deconfinement transitions in the coupling plane but it continues to behave also like the bulk transition line. We find separate deconfinement and bulk phase transitions on the same lattice, suggesting the two to be indeed coincident at higher adjoint couplings. Universality is restored when both monopoles and vortices are suppressed.Comment: LATTICE99(Finite Temp I), 3 pages, 3 eps figures, LaTeX, espcrc2.st