The imaginary part of the static gluon propagator in an anisotropic (viscous) QCD plasma

TL;DR

This paper calculates how viscosity affects the static gluon propagator and heavy-quark potential in a high-temperature QCD plasma, revealing reduced decay widths for quarkonium states in anisotropic conditions.

Contribution

It introduces viscosity corrections to gluon self energies and the static propagator within the weak-coupling hard loop approximation, a novel extension in anisotropic QCD plasma analysis.

Findings

Viscosity reduces the imaginary part of the static gluon propagator.

Quarkonium decay widths are smaller in anisotropic plasmas.

The results improve understanding of quarkonium behavior in viscous QCD media.

Abstract

We determine viscosity corrections to the retarded, advanced and symmetric gluon self energies and to the static propagator in the weak-coupling "hard loop" approximation to high-temperature QCD. We apply these results to calculate the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential which is found to be smaller (in magnitude) than at vanishing viscosity. This implies a smaller decay width of quarkonium bound states in an anisotropic plasma.