A thermodynamic quantum many-body $T$-matrix approach is employed to study the spectral and transport properties of the quark-gluon plasma at moderate temperatures where nonperturbative effects are essential. For the partonic two-body interaction we utilize a QCD-inspired Hamiltonian whose color forces are motivated by the heavy-quark (HQ) limit including remnants of the confining force, and augmented by relativistic corrections. We solve the in-medium parton propagators and $T$-matrices selfconsistently and resum the skeleton diagrams for the equation of state (EoS) to all orders thereby accounting for the dynamical formation of two-body bound states. Two types solutions for the in-medium potential are found in when fitting to lattice-QCD data for the EoS, HQ free energy and quarkonium correlators: a weakly-coupled scenario (WCS) with a (real part of the) potential close to the free energy, resulting in moderately broadened spectral functions and weak bound states near $T_c$, and a strongly-coupled scenario (SCS), with a much stronger potential which produces large imaginary parts (melting the parton spectral functions) and generates strong bound states near $T_c$. We calculate pertinent transport coefficients (specific shear viscosity and HQ diffusion coefficient) and argue that their constraints from heavy-ion phenomenology unambiguously favor the strongly-coupled scenario.
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