Discretization effects and gauge independence for the electric and magnetic screening masses

Abstract

We evaluate the electric and magnetic screening masses from the long-distance behavior of the (temporal and spatial) gluon correlation functions, for pure SU(2) gauge theory at finite temperature. In order to investigate the gauge dependence of the screening masses we consider seven different gauges. We also evaluate these masses using different definitions of the lattice gluon field, corresponding to discretization errors of different orders.