English

Towards a non-perturbative measurement of the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient

High Energy Physics - Lattice 2015-03-19 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We report on a lattice investigation of heavy quark diffusion within pure SU(3) plasma above the deconfinement transition, with the quarks treated to leading order in the heavy mass expansion. Using a multilevel algorithm, several volumes and lattice spacings, as well as tree-level improvement and perturbative renormalization, we measure the relevant "colour-electric" Euclidean correlator, finding that it clearly exceeds its perturbative counterpart. Even without analytic continuation, this suggests that at temperatures just above the critical one, non-perturbative interactions felt by the heavy quarks are stronger than within the weak-coupling expansion. After introducing rough modelling of the spectral shape, diffusion coefficients down to D ~ 0.5/T appear possible.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1109.3941,
  title  = {Towards a non-perturbative measurement of the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient},
  author = {A. Francis and O. Kaczmarek and M. Laine and J. Langelage},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.3941},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

7 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the XXIX International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 10-16, 2011, Squaw Valley, Lake Tahoe, California