An in-Medium Heavy-Quark Potential from the $Q\bar{Q}$ Free Energy

Understand

We investigate the problem of extracting a static potential between a quark and its antiquark in a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) from lattice-QCD computations of the singlet free energy, $F_{Q\bar{Q}}(r)$.

• We utilize the thermodynamic $T$-matrix formalism to calculate the free energy from an underlying potential ansatz resummed in ladder approximation.
• Imaginary parts of both $Q\bar Q$ potential-type and single-quark selfenergies are included as estimated from earlier results of the $T$-matrix approach.
• We find that the imaginary parts, and in particular their (low-) energy dependence, induce marked deviations of the (real part of the) potential from the calculated free energy.