Bulk viscous corrections to screening and damping in the deconfined phase at high temperature

TL;DR

This paper investigates how bulk viscous effects in a hot QCD medium influence gluon propagators, screening, and damping, potentially affecting quarkonium states near critical points.

Contribution

It introduces the impact of bulk viscous corrections on HTL resummed propagators and screening/damping scales in high-temperature QCD.

Findings

Bulk viscous corrections modify gluon propagators.

Screening and damping scales are sensitive to bulk pressure.

Potential implications for quarkonium properties near critical points.

Abstract

Non-equilibrium corrections in a hot QCD medium modify the "hard thermal loops" (HTL) which determine the resummed propagators for gluons with soft momenta as well as the Debye screening and Landau damping mass scales. We focus on bulk viscous corrections to a thermal fixed point. The screening and damping mass scales are sensitive to the bulk pressure and perhaps to (pseudo-) critical dynamical scaling of the bulk viscosity in the vicinity of a second-order critical point. This would affect the properties of quarkonium bound states in the deconfined phase.