Thermal modification of in-medium mesons from screening properties on the lattice

Abstract

Screening and melting properties of the mesonic excitations are studied from spatial correlation functions in (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD simulations with the highly improved staggered quark action. A comparative study of the in-medium modifications of mesons consisting strange-antistrange, strange-anti-charm and charm-anti-charm quarks is performed. We observe significant in-medium modifications for the φ and D s meson channels already at temperatures around the chiral crossover region. On the other hand, for the J/ψ and η c meson channels in-medium modifications remain relatively small around the chiral crossover region and become significant only above 1.3 times the chiral crossover temperature.