Speaker
Description
Chromo-electric screening at high temperature is encoded in the large distance behavior of Polyakov loop correlators. In SU(N) gauge theory (quenched QCD) the large distance behavior of the Polyakov loop correlators has been studied and the corresponding chromo-electric screening length has been determined. In QCD with light dynamical quarks this turned out to be very difficult because of the large Monte-Carlo noise. We study the long distance behavior of the correlator of the real and imaginary part of the Polyakov loop in 2+1 flavor QCD with nearly physical quark masses using HISQ action and lattices with temporal extent $N_t=6,~8,~10$ and $12$. To reduce the noise we apply several levels of HYP smearing to the Polyakov loops and determine the corresponding chromo-electric screening masses. We compare our results to the weak coupling calculations at high temperatures.
