Renormalization of the Polyakov loop with gradient flow

Abstract

We use the gradient flow for the renormalization of the Polyakov loop in various representations. Using 2+1 flavor QCD with highly improved staggered quarks and lattices with temporal extents of $N_{\tau }=6$, $8$, $10$ and $12$ we calculate the renormalized Polyakov loop in many representations including fundamental, sextet, adjoint, decuplet, 15-plet, 24-plet and 27-plet. This approach allows for the calculations of the renormalized Polyakov loops over a large temperature range from $T=116$ MeV up to $T=815$ MeV, with small errors not only for the Polyakov loop in fundamental representation, but also for the Polyakov loops in higher representations. We compare our results with standard renormalization schemes and discuss the Casimir scaling of the Polyakov loops.

Comments: 10 pages ReVTeX, 9 figures; typos corrected; This is the published version