Free energy of a static quark-antiquark pair and the renormalized Polyakov loop in three flavor QCD

Abstract

We study the free energy of a static quark anti-quark (QQ) pair at finite temperature in three flavor QCD with degenerate quark masses using Nτ = 4 and 6 lattices with Asqtad staggered fermion action. The static free energy was calculated for different values of the quark mass and the entropy contribution at large distances has been extracted. We also calculate the renormalized Polyakov loop following the approach by Kaczmarek et al.

Entropic destruction of heavy quarkonium in non-Abelian plasma from holography

“…The large amount of entropy associated with the heavy quark-antiquark pair immersed in the quark-gluon plasma found by the lattice QCD [11][12][13][14] indicates a strong degree of entanglement between the pair and the rest of the system. The strong and sharp peak in the entropy of the quark-antiquark pair at the deconfinement transition is a salient and previously unexplained feature of the lattice data.…”

“…Lattice QCD studies indicate a large amount of additional entropy associated with the presence of static quarkantiquark pair immersed in the QCD plasma [11][12][13][14], see Fig. 1.…”

“…The argument put forward in [10] was based on the lattice QCD results [11][12][13][14] indicating a large amount of entropy associated with the heavy quark-antiquark pair placed in the quark-gluon plasma. This entropy S was found to grow as a function of the distance L between the quark and antiquark on the lattice [11][12][13][14]. The proposal of [10] is that this entropy should give rise to the emergent entropic force…”

Quarkonia in the deconfined phase: Effective potentials and lattice correlators

“…These thermodynamical quantities have been obtained in quenched [57] and 2-flavor [58] QCD as a function of temperature and we display in Fig. 1 the resulting ratio (15) in the range of temperatures we are interested in. Note that the weight functions f F and f U turn out to vary in the range 3/4 f F 1 and 0 f U 1/4, respectively, a fact which explains why the QQ potential is closer (but not identical) to the free energy F 1 than to the internal energy U 1 .…”

“…Nowadays very precise lattice calculations of Polyakov line correlators are available, for different numbers of light dynamical fermions [11,12,13,14,15]. It has been known for a long time [16] that from these correlators it is possible to extract -in hot QCD, as a function of the temperature and of the QQ separation -the change in free energy once a QQ pair is placed in a thermal bath of gluons and light quarks.…”