Heavy Quark Thermalization in Classical Lattice Gauge Theory: Lessons for Strongly-Coupled QCD
Feb, 2009
21 pages
Published in:
- JHEP 05 (2009) 014
e-Print:
- 0902.2856 [hep-ph]
Report number:
- BI-TP-2009-03,
- MS-TP-09-1
View in:
Citations per year
Abstract: (arXiv)
Thermalization of a heavy quark near rest is controlled by the correlator of two electric fields along a temporal Wilson line. We address this correlator within real-time, classical lattice Yang-Mills theory, and elaborate on the analogies that exist with the dynamics of hot QCD. In the weak-coupling limit, it can be shown analytically that the dynamics on the two sides are closely related to each other. For intermediate couplings, we carry out non-perturbative simulations within the classical theory, showing that the leading term in the weak-coupling expansion significantly underestimates the heavy quark thermalization rate. Our analytic and numerical results also yield a general understanding concerning the overall shape of the spectral function corresponding to the electric field correlator, which may be helpful in subsequent efforts to reconstruct it from Euclidean lattice Monte Carlo simulations.- heavy quark
- field theory: classical
- numerical calculations: Monte Carlo
- expansion: weak coupling
- electric field
- correlation function
- quantum chromodynamics: strong coupling
- spectral representation
- lattice field theory
- nonperturbative
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