Polarised correlators at finite temperature

TL;DR

This paper investigates meson correlation functions at finite temperature in QCD, revealing that light quarks in the plasma phase exhibit non-zero spectral intercepts at zero energy for both longitudinal and transverse vector modes.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of polarized meson correlators at finite temperature using the Maximum Entropy Method in both confined and deconfined phases.

Findings

Both longitudinal and transverse spectral functions have non-zero zero-energy intercepts for light quarks in the plasma phase.

The study distinguishes the behavior of vector correlators across the deconfinement transition.

The work advances understanding of meson spectral functions at finite temperature.

Abstract

QCD undergoes a deconfining transition at high temperature to a "quark-gluon plasma" phase where hadrons may become unbound. In this work, meson correlation functions at non-zero momentum are studied both in the confined and plasma phases using the Maximum Entropy Method. In particular, both the longitudinal and transverse modes of the vector correlation functions are considered. Only in the case of light quarks in the plasma phase, we find that both longitudinal and transverse spectral functions have a non-zero intercept at zero energy.