Temperature dependence of heavy quark diffusion from 2+1 lattice QCD

¹ Computing and Data Sciences Directorate,Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA
² Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA
³ Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, D-33615 Bielefeld, Germany
⁴ Institut für Kernphysik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Schlossgartenstraße 2, D-64289 Darmstadt, Germany
⁵ Key Laboratory of Quark & Lepton Physics (MOE) and Institute of Particle Physics, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
⁶ Institut für Physik & IRIS Adlershof, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, D-12489 Berlin, Germany

^* e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Published online: 17 April 2026

Abstract

We present new lattice results for the heavy quark diffusion coefficient in 2+1 flavor QCD in the temperature range from 163 MeV up to 10 GeV. Compared to previous lattice calculations with unphysical light quark masses, we consider near-physical values and a much wider temperature range. Our results for the spatial heavy diffusion coefficient near the crossover temperature are considerably smaller than the estimates obtained by comparing phenomeno-logical models with experimental data and by T-matrix calculations, and are close to the AdS/CFT limit. At high temperatures, however, the spatial heavy diffusion coefficient increases and approaches the NLO weak coupling prediction within the estimated errors. We also find that the dependence of the spatial heavy quark diffusion coefficient on the heavy quark mass M_Q on the lattice is weaker compared to the model calculations.