Debye mass and heavy quark potential in a PNJL quark plasma

Abstract

We calculate the Debye mass for the screening of the heavy quark potential in a plasma of massless quarks coupled to the temporal gluon background governed by the Polyakov loop potential within the PNJL model in RPA approximation. We give a physical motivation for a recent phenomenological fit of lattice data by applying the calculated Debye mass with its suppression in the confined phase due to the Polyakov-loop to a description of the temperature dependence of the singlet free energy for QCD with a heavy quark pair at infinite separation. We compare the result to lattice data.

Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure, contribution to Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on "Critical Point and Onset of Deconfinement", to appear in Phys. At. Nucl., vol. 75