We calculate second- and fourth-order cumulants of conserved charges in a temperature range stretching from the QCD transition region towards the realm of (resummed) perturbation theory. We perform lattice simulations with staggered quarks; the continuum extrapolation is based on $N_t=10dots24$ in the crossover-region and $N_t=8dots16$ at higher temperatures. We find that the Hadron Resonance Gas model predictions describe the lattice data rather well in the confined phase. At high temperatures (above $sim$250 MeV) we find agreement with the three-loop Hard Thermal Loop results.
At high temperature part of the spectrum of the quark Dirac operator is known to consist of localized states. This comes about because around the crossover temperature to the quark-gluon plasma localized states start to appear at the low end of the spectrum and as the system is further heated, states higher up in the spectrum also get localized. Since localization and the crossover to the chirally restored phase happen around the same temperature, the question of how the two phenomena are connected naturally arises. Here we speculate on the nature of possible gauge configurations that could support localized quark eigenmodes. In particular, by analyzing eigenmodes of the staggerd and overlap Dirac operator we show that the dilute gas of calorons in the high temperature phase is very unlikely to play a major role in localization.
We calculate several diagonal and non-diagonal fluctuations of conserved charges in a system of 2+1+1 quark flavors with physical masses, on a lattice with size $48^3times12$. Higher order fluctuations at $mu_B=0$ are obtained as derivatives of the lower order ones, simulated at imaginary chemical potential. From these correlations and fluctuations we construct ratios of net-baryon number cumulants as functions of temperature and chemical potential, which satisfy the experimental conditions of strangeness neutrality and proton/baryon ratio. Our results qualitatively explain the behavior of the measured cumulant ratios by the STAR collaboration.
We compute charmonium spectral functions in 2-flavor QCD on anisotropic lattices using the maximum entropy method. Our results suggest that the S-waves (J/psi and eta_c) survive up to temperatures close to 2Tc, while the P-waves (chi_c0 and chi_c1) melt away below 1.2Tc.
Across the finite temperature transition to the quark-gluon plasma, the QCD topological susceptibility decreases sharply. Thus in the high temperature phase the remaining topological objects (possibly calorons) form a weakly interacting dilute gas. The overlap Dirac operator, through its exact zero modes, allows one to measure the net topological charge. We show that separately the number of positively and negatively charged topological objects can also be extracted from the low end of the overlap Dirac spectrum. We find that slightly above the phase transition their number distributions are already consistent with an ideal gas of non-interacting topological objects.
A brief overview of the QCD phase diagram at nonzero temperature and density is provided. It is explained why standard lattice QCD techniques are not immediately applicable for its determination, due to the sign problem. We then discuss a selection of recent lattice approaches that attempt to evade the sign problem and classify them according to the underlying principle: constrained simulations (density of states, histograms), holomorphicity (complex Langevin, Lefschetz thimbles), partial summations (clusters, subsets, bags) and change in integration order (strong coupling, dual formulations).