Electrical conductivity of the quark-gluon plasma across the deconfinement transition

Abstract

A lattice calculation is presented for the electrical conductivity of the QCD plasma with 2+1 dynamical flavours at nonzero temperature. We employ the conserved lattice current on anisotropic lattices using a tadpole-improved clover action and study the behaviour of the conductivity over a wide range of temperatures, both below and above the deconfining transition. The conductivity is extracted from a spectral-function analysis using the Maximal Entropy Method and a discussion of its systematics is provided.

Comments: 4 pages, 3 figures, normalisation of the conductivity clarified, minor changes, to appear in PRL