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Spatial String Tension and Its Effects on Screening Correlators in a Thermal QCD Plasma

Dibyendu Bala1, Olaf Kaczmarek1, Peter Petreczky2, Sayantan Sharma3, and Swagatam Tah3,*

  • *Contact author: swagatamt@imsc.res.in
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 012301 – Published 30 June, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/3tmf-s94w

Abstract

We calculate the spatial Wilson line correlator for 2+1 flavor QCD using highly improved staggered quark discretization for fermions and in quenched QCD for a wide range of temperatures, from the chiral crossover temperature Tpc≃156  MeV or the deconfinement temperature ≃300  MeV, respectively, up to 2 GeV. Extracting the spatial string tension for different lattice cutoffs and by performing a continuum extrapolation of this observable, we show that the soft (magnetic) gluons interact nonperturbatively even at temperatures ≳1  GeV. We provide incriminating evidences to demonstrate that dimensionally reduced effective theories can describe these soft quark and gluon quasi-particles for both quenched and 2+1 flavor QCD, at temperatures T≳5Tpc. We also show for the first time the imprints of the nonperturbative pseudopotential in the properties of mesonic screening masses for temperatures ranging from 0.8 to 164 GeV in the quark-gluon plasma.

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 012301– Published 30 June, 2025
  • Received 2 February 2025
  • Accepted 21 May 2025
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