We investigate chemical-potential (mu) dependence of static-quark free energies in both the real and imaginary mu regions, performing lattice QCD simulations at imaginary mu and extrapolating the results to the real mu region with analytic continuation. Lattice QCD calculations are done on a 16^{3}times 4 lattice with the clover-improved two-flavor Wilson fermion action and the renormalization-group improved Iwasaki gauge action. Static-quark potential is evaluated from the Polyakov-loop correlation functions in the deconfinement phase. As the analytic continuation, the potential calculated at imaginary mu=imu_{rm I} is expanded into a Taylor-expansion series of imu_{rm I}/T up to 4th order and the pure imaginary variable imu_{rm I}/T is replaced by the real one mu_{rm R}/T. At real mu, the 4th-order term weakens mu dependence of the potential sizably. At long distance, all of the color singlet and non-singlet potentials tend to twice the single-quark free energy, indicating that the interactions between heavy quarks are fully color-screened for finite mu. For both real and imaginary mu, the color-singlet q{bar q} and the color-antitriplet qq interaction are attractive, whereas the color-octet q{bar q} and the color-sextet qq interaction are repulsive. The attractive interactions have stronger mu/T dependence than the repulsive interactions. The color-Debye screening mass is extracted from the color-singlet potential at imaginary mu, and the mass is extrapolated to real mu by analytic continuation. The screening mass thus obtained has stronger mu dependence than the prediction of the leading-order thermal perturbation theory at both real and imaginary mu.
Download