Continuum estimate of the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient κ\kappa

Among quantities playing a central role in the theoretical interpretation of heavy ion collision experiments at RHIC and LHC are so-called transport coefficients. Out of those heavy quark diffusion coefficients play an important role e.g. for the analysis of the quenching of jets containing c or b quarks (D or B mesons) as observed at RHIC and LHC. We report on a lattice investigation of heavy quark momentum diffusion within pure SU(3) plasma above the deconfinement transition with the quarks treated to leading order in the heavy mass expansion. We measure the relevant colour-electric Euclidean correlator and based on several lattice spacings perform the continuum extrapolation. This extends our previous studies progressing towards a removal of lattice artifacts and a physical interpretation of the results. We find that the correlation function clearly exceeds its perturbative counterpart which suggests that at temperatures just above the critical one, non-perturbative interactions felt by the heavy quarks are stronger than within the weak-coupling expansion. Using an Ansatz for the spectral function which includes NNLO perturbative contributions we were able to determine, for the first time, a continuum estimate for the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Ultra-Relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter 2014), accepted version to appear in Nucl.Phys.

Static quark anti-quark interactions in zero and finite temperature QCD. I. Heavy quark free energies, running coupling and quarkonium binding

We analyze heavy quark free energies in 2-flavor QCD at finite temperature and the corresponding heavy quark potential at zero temperature. Static quark anti-quark sources in color singlet, octet and color averaged channels are used to probe thermal modifications of the medium. The temperature dependence of the running coupling, $\alpha_{qq}(r,T)$, is analyzed at short and large distances and is compared to zero temperature as well as quenched calculations. In parts we also compare our results to recent findings in 3-flavor QCD. We find that the characteristic length scale below which the running coupling shows almost no temperature dependence is almost twice as large as the Debye screening radius. Our analysis supports recent findings which suggest that $\chi_c$ and $\psi\prime$ are suppressed already at the (pseudo-) critical temperature and thus give a probe for quark gluon plasma production in heavy ion collision experiments, while $J/\psi$ may survive the transition and will dissolve at higher temperatures.Comment: 16 pages, 15 encapsulated postscript figures, revtex

Renormalization of Polyakov loops in fundamental and higher representations

We compare two renormalization procedures, one based on the short distance behavior of heavy quark-antiquark free energies and the other by using bare Polyakov loops at different temporal extent of the lattice and find that both prescriptions are equivalent, resulting in renormalization constants that depend on the bare coupling. Furthermore these renormalization constants show Casimir scaling for higher representations of the Polyakov loops. The analysis of Polyakov loops in different representations of the color SU(3) group indicates that a simple perturbative inspired relation in terms of the quadratic Casimir operator is realized to a good approximation at temperatures T \gsim T_c for renormalized as well as bare loops. In contrast to a vanishing Polyakov loop in representations with non-zero triality in the confined phase, the adjoint loops are small but non-zero even for temperatures below the critical one. The adjoint quark-antiquark pairs exhibit screening. This behavior can be related to the binding energy of gluelump states.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures. Presented at 25th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, Regensburg, Germany, 30 Jul - 4 Aug 200

Free Energy of a Heavy Quark-Antiquark Pair in a Thermal Medium from AdS/CFT

We study the free energy of a heavy quark-antiquark pair in a thermal medium using the AdS/CFT correspondence. We point out that a commonly used prescription for calculating this quantity leads to a temperature dependence in conflict with general properties of the free energy. The problem originates from a particular way of subtracting divergences. We argue that the commonly used prescription gives rise to the binding energy rather than the free energy. We consider a different subtraction procedure and show that the resulting free energy is well-behaved and in qualitative agreement with results from lattice QCD. The free energy and the binding energy of the quark pair are computed for N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and several non-conformal theories. We also calculate the entropy and the internal energy of the pair in these theories. Using the consistent subtraction, we further study the free energy, entropy, and internal energy of a single heavy quark in the thermal medium for various theories. Also here the results are found to be in qualitative agreement with lattice QCD results.Comment: 47 pages, 14 figures; v2: discussion extended, matches journal versio

Flavored aspects of QCD thermodynamics from Lattice QCD

We discuss recent progress in lattice QCD studies on various aspects involving strange quarks. Appropriate combinations of conserved net strange and net charm fluctuations and their correlations with other conserved charges provide evidence that in the hadronic phase so far unobserved hadrons contribute to the thermodynamics and need to be included in hadron resonance gas models. In the strange sector this leads to significant reductions of the chemical freeze-out temperature of strange hadrons. In this context, a discussion of data from heavy-ion collisions at SPS, RHIC and LHC on the chemical freeze-out of hadronic species is presented. It can be observed that a description of the thermodynamics of open strange and open charm degrees of freedom in terms of an uncorrelated hadron gas is valid only up to temperatures close to the chiral crossover temperature. This suggests that in addition to light and strange hadrons also open charm hadrons start to dissolve already close to the chiral crossover. Further indications that open charm mesons start to melt in the vicinity of $T_c$ is obtained from an analysis of screening masses, while in the charmonium sector these screening masses show a behavior compatible with a sequential melting pattern. At the end of this chapter we will discuss some basics of lattice gauge theory and Monte Carlo calculations. This will provide the required knowledge for performing first lattice calculations for SU(3) pure gauge theory and studying thermodynamic quantities in the exercises of this chapter.Comment: Invited lecture given at the 53rd Karpacz Winter School of Theoretical Physics, 26 February to 4 March 2017. Submitted to Lecture Notes in Physics (LNP, volume 999), ISBN: 978-3-030-95490-

Heavy quark free energies for three quark systems at finite temperature

We study the free energy of static three quark systems in singlet, octet, decuplet and average color channels in the quenched approximation and in 2-flavor QCD at finite temperature. We show that in the high temperature phase singlet and decuplet free energies of three quark systems are well described by the sum of the free energies of three diquark systems plus self energy contributions of the three quarks. In the confining low temperature phase we find evidence for a Y-shaped flux tube in SU(3) pure gauge theory, which is less evident in 2-flavor QCD due to the onset of string breaking. We also compare the short distance behavior of octet and decuplet free energies to the free energies of single static quarks in the corresponding color representations.Comment: 11 pages, 17 figure