A lattice calculation is presented for the electrical conductivity σ of the QCD plasma with 2+1 dynamical flavors at nonzero temperature. We employ the conserved lattice current on anisotropic lattices using a tadpole-improved clover action and study the behavior of the conductivity over a wide range of temperatures, both below and above the deconfining transition. The conductivity is extracted from a spectral-function analysis using the maximal entropy method, and a discussion of its systematics is provided. We find an increase of σ/T across the transition.

We study the spectrum of light baryons and hyperons as a function of temperature using lattice gauge theory methods. We find that masses of positive parity states are temperature independent, within errors, in the hadronic phase. The negative parity states decrease in mass as the temperature increases. Above the deconfining temperature, lattice correlators and spectral functions show a degeneracy between parity sectors, i.e. parity doubling. We apply our findings to an in-medium Hadron Resonance Gas model. The techniques used in this study include direct analysis of the hadronic correlation functions, conventional fitting procedures, and the Maximum Entropy Method.

We study the fate of P wave bottomonium states in the quark-gluon plasma, using a spectral function analysis of euclidean lattice correlators. The correlators are obtained from lattice QCD simulations with two light quark flavours on highly anisotropic lattices, treating the bottom quark nonrelativistically. We find clear indications of melting immediately after the deconfinement transition.

The spectral functions of QCD can give us insight into properties of hadrons, and they are useful in probing the QCD vacuum. I will discuss the correlators and spectral functions of charmonium in high temperature two flavour QCD. The spectral functions have been obtained using the Maximum Entropy Method from anisotropic lattice data using the conserved vector current. This work has been done as part of the FASTSUM collaboration. We find that the spectral functions for zero momentum are stable. At non-zero momentum the spectral functions are less stable but still produce resonance and transport peaks. This work is part of our programme to calculate the heavy quark diffusion constant.31st International Symposium on Lattice field theory LATTICE

The FASTSUM collaboration presents a study on the temperature dependence of the electrical conductivity σ in the quark-gluon plasma, using the methods of lattice QCD. Correlators of the exactly conserved vector current are measured at different temperatures across the deconfinement transition, using ensembles of 2 + 1 flavours of dynamical fermions on anisotropic lattices. We then employ bayesian methods (MEM) to extract the relevant spectral functions, which are found to be consistent with σ /T rising as a function of T . The robustness of the results is verified by a detailed analysis of the systematics involved in the bayesian reconstruction of the spectral functions.