The in-medium heavy quark potential from quenched and dynamical lattice QCD

Abstract

We present our latest results for the the complex valued static heavy-quark potential at finite temperature from lattice QCD. The real and imaginary part of the potential are obtained from the position and width of the lowest lying peak in the spectral function of the Wilson line correlator in Coulomb gauge. Spectral information is extracted from Euclidean time data using a novel Bayesian approach different from the Maximum Entropy Method. In order to extract both the real and imaginary part, we generated anisotropic quenched lattices $32^3\times N_\tau$ $(\beta=7.0,\xi=3.5)$ with $N_\tau=24,\ldots,96$, corresponding to $839{\rm MeV} \geq T\geq 210 {\rm MeV}$. For the case of a realistic QCD medium with light u, d and s quarks we use isotropic $48^3\times12$ ASQTAD lattices with $m_l=m_s/20$ provided by the HotQCD collaboration, which span $286 {\rm MeV} \geq T\geq 148{\rm MeV}$. We find a clean transition from a confining to a Debye screened real part and observe that its values lie close to the color singlet free energies in Coulomb gauge. The imaginary part, estimated on quenched lattices, is found to be of the same order of magnitude as in hard-thermal loop (HTL) perturbation theory.