Realistic in-medium heavy-quark potential from high statistics lattice QCD simulations

TL;DR

This paper presents high-statistics lattice QCD simulations to directly compute the complex in-medium heavy-quark potential, revealing its temperature-dependent behavior and the presence of an imaginary component in the quark-gluon plasma.

Contribution

It introduces a robust method combining Bayesian reconstruction and Padé approximation to extract the potential from lattice data with unprecedented resolution and statistics.

Findings

Real part of the potential transitions from confining to screened at high temperatures.

Values of the real part are close to color singlet free energies.

Finite imaginary part observed in the quark-gluon plasma phase.

Abstract

We present our first results on a direct computation of the complex in-medium heavy quark potential from realistic lattice QCD simulations. Ensembles with $N_\tau=12$ from the HotQCD and TUMQCD collaboration offer unprecedented high statistics, those with $N_\tau=16$ unprecedented time resolution, making possible a robust extraction of the real part from the spectral functions of Wilson line correlators. To this end we deploy a combination of a Bayesian reconstruction (BR method), as well as a Pad\'e-like approximation. We corroborate findings made on less realistic lattices that ${\rm Re}[V]$ smoothly transitions from a confining to a screened behavior at high temperatures and its values lie close to the color singlet free energies. A finite value of the ${\rm Im}[V]$ is observed in the quark-gluon-plasma phase.