Long and short distance behavior of the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential

Abstract

The imaginary part of the effective heavy-quark potential can be related to the total in-medium decay width of of heavy quark-antiquark bound states. We extract the static limit of this quantity using classical-statistical simulations of the real-time Yang-Mills dynamics by measuring the temporal decay of Wilson loops. By performing the simulations on finer and larger lattices we are able to show that the nonperturbative results follow the same form as the perturbative ones. For large quark-antiquark separations, we quantify the magnitude of the non-perturbative long-range corrections to the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential. We present our results for a wide range of temperatures, lattice spacings, and lattice volumes. We also extract approximations for the short-distance behavior of the classical potential.