Color screening and quark-quark interactions in finite temperature QCD

Abstract

We analyze the screening of static diquark sources in 2-flavor QCD and compare results with the screening of static quark-antiquark pairs. We show that a two quark system in a fixed color representations is screened at short distances like a single quark source in the same color representation whereas at large distances the two quarks are screened independently. At high temperatures we observe that the relative strength of the interaction in diquark and quark-antiquark systems, respectively, obeys Casimir scaling. We use this result to examine the possible existence of heavy quark-quark bound states in the high temperature phase of QCD. We find support for the existence of $bb$ states up to about $2T_c$ while $cc$ states are unlikely to be formed above $T_c$.