Screening of hot gluon

TL;DR

This study uses lattice QCD to calculate electric and magnetic gluon masses between the critical temperature and six times that temperature, revealing finite magnetic masses and temperature-dependent electric masses consistent with perturbative predictions.

Contribution

It provides the first lattice QCD calculations of gluon screening masses in the high-temperature quark-gluon plasma, confirming perturbative results and showing the effectiveness of hard-thermal-loop resummation.

Findings

Magnetic mass remains finite in the studied temperature range.

Electric mass's temperature dependence aligns with perturbative calculations.

Hard-thermal-loop resummation significantly improves electric mass estimates.

Abstract

We calculate electric and magnetic masses of gluons between T = T_c and 6T_c using lattice QCD (quantum chromodynamics) in the quench approximation. We find that magnetic mass has finite values in this region, and the temperature dependence of the electric mass is consistent with that determined using the hard-thermal-loop perturbation. The hard-thermal-loop resummation improves significantly the magnitude of the electric mass comparing to the leading order perturbation. Both screening masses have little gauge dependence.