Lattice QCD constraints on the heavy quark diffusion coefficient

Abstract

We report progress toward computing the heavy quark momentum diffusion coefficient from the correlator of two chromoelectric fields attached to a Polyakov loop in pure SU(3) gauge theory. Using a multilevel algorithm and tree-level improvement, we study the behavior of the diffusion coefficient as a function of temperature in the wide range $1.1<T/{T}_{\mathrm{c}}<{10}^{4}$ in order to compare it to perturbative expansions at high temperature. We find that within errors, the lattice results are remarkably compatible with the next-to-leading-order perturbative result.