Electrical Conductivity of the Quark-Gluon Plasma Across the Deconfinement Transition

Alessandro Amato,Simon Hands,Chris Allton,Jon-Ivar Skullerud,Pietro Giudice,Gert Aarts

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.111.172001

Abstract

A lattice calculation is presented for the electrical conductivity σ of the QCD plasma with 2+1 dynamical flavors at nonzero temperature. We employ the conserved lattice current on anisotropic lattices using a tadpole-improved clover action and study the behavior of the conductivity over a wide range of temperatures, both below and above the deconfining transition. The conductivity is extracted from a spectral-function analysis using the maximal entropy method, and a discussion of its systematics is provided. We find an increase of σ/T across the transition.

Highlights

Introduction.—Transport coefficients, such as the shear and bulk viscosity, the electrical conductivity, and heavyquark diffusion constants, can be seen as parameters in the low-energy effective theories that describe real-time evolution in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) on the longest length and time scales, encoding the dynamics of the underlying quantum field theory, QCD
A lattice calculation is presented for the electrical conductivity of the QCD plasma with 2 þ 1 dynamical flavors at nonzero temperature
When using lattice QCD, which is formulated in Euclidean space-time, the main challenge is the construction of spectral functions from Euclidean correlators, i.e., the analytical continuation from imaginary to real time

Summary

Introduction

Introduction.—Transport coefficients, such as the shear and bulk viscosity, the electrical conductivity, and heavyquark diffusion constants, can be seen as parameters in the low-energy effective theories that describe real-time evolution in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) on the longest length and time scales, encoding the dynamics of the underlying quantum field theory, QCD. Electrical Conductivity of the Quark-Gluon Plasma Across the Deconfinement Transition A lattice calculation is presented for the electrical conductivity of the QCD plasma with 2 þ 1 dynamical flavors at nonzero temperature.

Results

Conclusion