News from lattice QCD on heavy quark potentials and spectral functions of heavy quark states

Abstract

We discuss recent lattice results on in-medium properties of hadrons and focus on thermal properties of heavy quark bound states. We will clarify the relation between heavy quark free energies and potentials used to analyse the melting of heavy quark bound states. Furthermore, we present calculations of meson spectral functions which indicate that the charmonium ground states, J/ψ and ηc, persist in the quark–gluon plasma as well-defined resonances with no significant change of their zero-temperature masses at least up to T ≃ 1.5Tc. We also briefly comment on the current status of lattice calculations at non-vanishing baryon number density.