Long and short distance behavior of the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential

TL;DR

This paper investigates the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential in a medium, using classical simulations to compare nonperturbative results with perturbative predictions across various conditions.

Contribution

It provides nonperturbative lattice simulation results for the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential, extending understanding of its behavior at different distances and temperatures.

Findings

Nonperturbative results match perturbative form at large distances.

Quantified long-range corrections to the imaginary part.

Provided data across multiple temperatures and lattice parameters.

Abstract

The imaginary part of the effective heavy-quark potential is related to the total in-medium decay width of heavy quark-antiquark bound states. We extract the static limit of this quantity using classical-statistical simulations of real-time Yang-Mills dynamics by measuring the temporal decay of Wilson loops. By performing the simulations on finer and larger lattices, we are able to show that the nonperturbative results follow the same form as the perturbative ones. For large quark-antiquark separations, we quantify the magnitude of the non-perturbative long-range corrections to the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential. We present our results for a wide range of temperatures, lattice spacings, and lattice volumes. We also extract approximations for the short-distance behavior of the classical potential.