The complex potential from 2+1 flavor QCD using HTL inspired approach

TL;DR

This study investigates the complex static quark-antiquark potential in 2+1 flavor QCD at finite temperature, revealing screening effects and the behavior of real and imaginary parts across the crossover temperature.

Contribution

It introduces an HTL-inspired parametrization method to extract the complex potential from lattice QCD data with physical quark masses.

Findings

Real part of potential is screened above crossover temperature.

Imaginary part increases with distance and temperature.

Potential closely matches singlet free energies.

Abstract

We have studied finite temperature complex static quark-antiquark potentials for 2+1 flavor QCD using highly improved staggered action with physical strange quark masses and light quark masses corresponding to a pion mass of 161 MeV. We calculated the potential using Wilson line correlators fixed in Coulomb gauge. For the extraction, we have used HTL motivated parametrization of the correlators. We found that the real part of the potential is screened above the crossover temperature and it's close to singlet free energies, whereas the imaginary part is increasing with both distance and temperature.