Mesonic correlators in hot QCD

Abstract

Certain spacelike mesonic correlation lengths serve as interesting theoretical probes for the reliability of perturbation theory in high-temperature QCD, are directly sensitive to chiral symmetry restoration and to the axial anomaly, and might also have indirect phenomenological signatures in idealised heavy ion collision experiments. I review here the weak-coupling predictions for some of these correlation lengths, to be compared with results from lattice Monte Carlo simulations.

10 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of SEWM04, Helsinki, Finland, 16-19 June 2004