PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

According to a proposal by Arnold and Yaffe, the non-perturbative g(2)T-contribution to the Debye mass in the deconfined QCD plasma phase can be determined from a single Wilson line operator in the three-dimensional pure SU(3) gauge theory. We extend a previous SU(2) measurement of this quantity to the physical SU(3) case. We find a numerical coefficient which is more accurate and smaller than that obtained previously with another method, but still very large compared with the naive expectation: the correction is larger than the leading term up to T similar to 10(7)T(c), corresponding to g(2) similar to 0.4. At moderate temperatures T similar to 2T(c), a consistent picture emerges where the Debye mass is m(D) similar to 6T, the lightest gauge invariant screening mass in the system is similar to 3T, and the purely magnetic operators couple dominantly to a scale similar to 6T. Electric (similar to gT) and magnetic (similar to g(2)T) scales are therefore strongly overlapping close to the phase transition, and the colour-electric fields play an essential role in the dynamics. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.