Temperature Dependence of Heavy Quark Diffusion from (2+1)-flavor Lattice QCD

TL;DR

This study computes the heavy-quark diffusion coefficient across a broad temperature range in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD, revealing rapid thermalization and agreement with strong-coupling models near the crossover temperature.

Contribution

First lattice QCD determination of heavy-quark diffusion coefficients with near-physical quark masses over a wide temperature range.

Findings

Results agree with previous HotQCD studies.

Indicate fast thermalization of heavy quarks in QGP.

Near $T_c$, results align with AdS/CFT predictions.

Abstract

We present a lattice determination of the heavy-quark diffusion coefficient in (2+1)-flavor QCD with almost physical quark masses. The momentum and spatial diffusion coefficients are extracted for a wide temperature range, from $T=163$ MeV to $10$ GeV. The results are in agreement with previous works from the HotQCD collaboration, and show fast thermalization of the heavy quark inside the QGP. Near the chiral crossover temperature $T_c\simeq150$ MeV, our results are close to the AdS/CFT estimation computed at strong coupling.