On the smallest screening masses in hot QCD

Abstract

The increasing focus on unquenched lattice simulations has revived interest also in gluonic screening masses, whose inverses characterise the longest length scales at which thermal fluctuations are correlated in a hot non-Abelian plasma. We fill an apparent gap in the literature concerning the theoretical structure of one of the relevant screening masses (the one which equals twice the Debye mass at leading order), by showing that the next-to-leading order correction to it is perturbative and small. This surprising result appears to explain semi-quantitatively why this particular channel yields the smallest gluonic screening mass at temperatures around a few hundred MeV (it couples to the energy density and to the real part of the Polyakov loop), even though it is not among the smallest screening masses at asymptotically high temperatures.

10 pages. v2: clarifications and typographic corrections; published version

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• Transport Properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma -- A Lattice QCD Perspective
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• Color screening in (2+1)-flavor QCD
• Dimensionally regularized Polyakov loop correlators in hot QCD
• Electric and Magnetic Screening Masses at Finite Temperature from Generalized Polyakov-Line Correlations in Two-flavor Lattice QCD
• Casimir scaling and renormalization of Polyakov loops in large-N gauge theories
• Dissociation of heavy quarkonium in hot QCD medium in a quasi-particle model
• Ultraviolet asymptotics of scalar and pseudoscalar correlators in hot Yang-Mills theory
• Debye screening mass near deconfinement from holography
• A non-perturbative contribution to jet quenching
• A QCD Debye mass in a broad temperature range
• Debye screening mass of hot Yang-Mills theory to three-loop order
• Spatial correlators in strongly coupled plasmas
• Mass-suppressed effects in heavy quark diffusion
• Polyakov loop correlator in perturbation theory
• Intermediate distance correlators in hot Yang-Mills theory
• Quasi-static probes of the QCD plasma
• Screening Masses in Gluonic Plasma
• Screening properties of quark-gluon plasma obtained from distribution and correlation functions of the constituent quasiparticle model