Static Potential At Non-zero Temperatures From Fine Lattices

Abstract

We report on a preliminary study of static quark anti-quark potential at non-zero temperature in $2+1$ flavor QCD using $96^3\times N_{\tau}$ lattices with lattice spacing $a=0.028$fm, physical strange quark mass and light quark masses corresponding to pion mass of about $300$ MeV. We use $N_\tau=32,~24,~20$ and $16$ that correspond to temperature range $T=220-441$ MeV. The in order to obtain the potential we calculate the Wilson line correlator in Coulomb gauge with additional HYP smearing to reduce the noise at large quark anti-quark separations. We apply $0$, $5$ and $10$ steps of HYP smearing to ensure that there is no physical effect from over-smearing. At the two highest temperatures we also consider a noise reduction technique that is based on an interpolation in the spatial separation between the static quark and anti-quark.