Constant contribution in meson correlators at finite temperature

TL;DR

This paper investigates a constant contribution to meson correlators at finite temperature, revealing its impact on charmonium states and its relation to transport phenomena in the quark-gluon plasma.

Contribution

It introduces analysis methods to distinguish constant contributions in meson correlators and shows their effect on charmonium behavior above the deconfinement transition.

Findings

Constant contribution dominates correlators at large imaginary times.

The contribution is linked to transport phenomena in the quark-gluon plasma.

Charmonium states like χc may survive above the deconfinement temperature.

Abstract

We discuss a constant contribution to meson correlators at finite temperature. In the deconfinement phase of QCD, a colored single quark state is allowed as a finite energy state, which yields to a contribution of wraparound quark propagation to temporal meson correlators. We investigate the effects in the free quark case and quenched QCD at finite temperature. The ``scattering'' contribution causes a constant mode in meson correlators with zero spatial momentum and degenerate quark masses, which can dominate the correlators in the region of large imaginary times. In the free spectral function, the contribution yields a term proportional to $\omega\delta(\omega)$. Therefore this contribution is related to transport phenomena in the quark gluon plasma. It is possible to distinguish the constant contribution from the other part using several analysis methods proposed in this paper. As a result of the analyses, we find that drastic changes in charmonium correlators for $\chi_c$ states just above the deconfinement transition are due to the constant contribution. The other differences in the $\chi_c$ states are small. It may indicate the survival of $\chi_c$ states after the deconfinement transition until, at least, $1.4T_c$.