Heavy quark free energies and screening at finite temperature and density

Abstract

We study the free energies of heavy quarks calculated from Polyakov loop correlation functions in full 2-flavour QCD using the p4-improved staggered fermion action. A small but finite Baryon number density is included via Taylor expansion of the fermion determinant in the Baryo-chemical potential mu. For temperatures above Tc we extract Debye screening masses from the large distance behaviour of the free energies and compare their mu-dependence to perturbative results.

Comments: 6 pages, Presented at 23rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2005), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 25-30 Jul 2005