Static quark anti-quark interactions at non-zero temperature from lattice QCD

TL;DR

This paper investigates static quark-antiquark interactions at non-zero temperature using lattice QCD, revealing that the real-part of the potential remains stable with temperature, contrasting previous quenched QCD results.

Contribution

It provides new lattice QCD results on in-medium quark-antiquark interactions with spectral analysis, highlighting differences from quenched QCD studies.

Findings

The real-part of the interquark potential remains unaffected by temperature.

Spectral peak positions are stable across temperature changes.

Contrasts with prior quenched QCD results are demonstrated.

Abstract

We present results on the in-medium interactions of static quark anti-quark pairs using realistic 2+1 HISQ flavor lattice QCD. Focus is put on the extraction of spectral information from Wilson line correlators in Coulomb gauge using four complementary methods. Our results indicate that on HISQ lattices, the position of the dominant spectral peak associated with the real-part of the interquark potential remains unaffected by temperature. This is in contrast to prior work in quenched QCD and we present follow up comparisons to newly generated quenched ensembles.