Electrical Conductivity of Hot QCD Matter

Understand

We study the electric conductivity of hot QCD matter at various temperatures T within the off-shell parton-hadron-string dynamics transport approach for interacting partonic, hadronic or mixed systems in a finite box with periodic boundary conditions.

• The response of the strongly interacting system in equilibrium to an external electric field defines the electric conductivity sigma_0.
• We find a sizable temperature dependence of the ratio sigma_0/T well in line with calculations in a relaxation time approach for Tc<T<2.5Tc.
• The ratio drops in the hadronic phase with T, shows a minimum close to Tc, and becomes approximately constant (~0.3) above ~5Tc.