Baryonic screening masses in high temperature QCD

We compute the screening masses of fields with nucleon quantum numbers for a wide range of temperatures between T ∼ 1 GeV and T ∼ 160 GeV. The computation has been performed by means of Monte Carlo simulations of lattice QCD with Nf = 3 flavors of O(a)-improved Wilson fermions: we exploit a novel strategy which has recently allowed to determine for the first time non-singlet mesonic screening masses up to extremely high temperatures. The baryonic screening masses are measured with a few per-mille precision in the continuum limit, and percent deviations from the free theory result 3πT are clearly visible even at the highest temperatures. The observed degeneracy of the positive and negative parity state's screening mass, expected from Ward identities associated to non-singlet axial transformations, provides further evidence for the restoration of chiral symmetry in the high temperature regime of QCD. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons.