Screening of heavy quark free energies at finite temperatureand non-zero baryon chemical potential

Abstract.

We analyze the dependence of heavy quark free energies on the baryon chemical potential μ _b in 2-flavor QCD by performing a 6th order Taylor expansion in the chemical potential which circumvents the sign problem. The bare quark mass at $\hat m / T = 0.4$ corresponds to a pion mass of about 770 MeV and is thus not in the range of physical quark masses but the quark mass dependence is known to be small above T _c. At N _τ = 4 the lattices are coarse, however, we are using improved (p4 staggered) fermions. The Taylor expansion coefficients of color singlet and color averaged free energies are calculated and from this the expansion coefficients for the corresponding screening masses are determined. We find that for small μ _b the free energies of a static quark-antiquark pair decrease in a medium with a net excess of quarks and that screening is well described by a screening mass which increases with increasing μ _b . The μ _b -dependent corrections to the screening masses are well described by perturbation theory for T ≳ 2T _c. In particular, we find for all temperatures above T _c that the expansion coefficients for singlet and color averaged screening masses differ by a factor 2.

PACS. 11.15.Ha, 11.10.Wx, 12.38Gc, 12.38.Mh