The heavy-quark potential in an anisotropic plasma

TL;DR

This paper calculates the heavy-quark potential in an anisotropic quark-gluon plasma, revealing directional dependence and stronger attraction along the anisotropy axis, which impacts quark interactions in such environments.

Contribution

It provides a new calculation of the heavy-quark potential in an anisotropic plasma using the hard-loop resummed propagator in covariant gauges.

Findings

Stronger attraction for quark pairs aligned with the anisotropy direction.

Directional dependence of the potential on the anisotropy.

Potential relevant at scales around the inverse Debye mass.

Abstract

We determine the hard-loop resummed propagator in an anisotropic QCD plasma in general covariant gauges and define a potential between heavy quarks from the Fourier transform of its static limit. We find that there is stronger attraction on distance scales on the order of the inverse Debye mass for quark pairs aligned along the direction of anisotropy than for transverse alignment.