Lattice QCD constraints on the heavy quark diffusion coefficient

TL;DR

This paper advances the calculation of the heavy quark diffusion coefficient in pure SU(3) gauge theory using lattice QCD, finding results consistent with perturbative predictions across a wide temperature range.

Contribution

It introduces a lattice QCD method with multilevel algorithms to compute the heavy quark diffusion coefficient over a broad temperature spectrum, aligning with perturbative results.

Findings

Lattice results agree with next-to-leading order perturbation theory.

The diffusion coefficient varies smoothly across the studied temperature range.

Method demonstrates effective computation of transport coefficients in gauge theories.

Abstract

We report progress towards computing the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient from the correlator of two chromo-electric fields attached to a Polyakov loop in pure SU(3) gauge theory. Using a multilevel algorithm and tree-level improvement, we study the behavior of the diffusion coefficient as a function of temperature in the wide range $1.1 < T / T_c < 10^4$ in order to compare it to perturbative expansions at high temperature. We find that within errors the lattice results are remarkably compatible with the next-to-leading order perturbative result.