Short distance physics with heavy quark potentials

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of heavy quark potentials at short distances near the critical temperature in lattice QCD, revealing that temperature effects diminish and potentials become distance-dependent functions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of short-distance heavy quark potentials at finite temperature, normalizing potentials and extracting free energy in quenched QCD.

Findings

Temperature influence diminishes at short distances.

Potentials become a universal function of distance.

Extracted free energy of quark system.

Abstract

We present lattice studies of heavy quark potentials in the quenched approximation of QCD at finite temperatures. Both, the color singlet and color averaged potentials are calculated. While the potentials are well known at large distances, we give a detailed analysis of their short distance behavior (from 0.015 fm to 1 fm) near the critical temperature. At these distances we expect that the T-dependent potentials go over into the zero temperature potential. Indeed, we find evidences that the temperature influence gets suppressed and the potentials starts to become a unique function of the underlying distance scale. We use this feature to normalize the heavy quark potentials at short distances and extract the free energy of the quark system in a gluonic heat bath.