The project aims to push the studies of spectral and transport properties of the QGP, where the team has developed and applied various methods in the quenched approximation and recently for unphysical light quark degrees of freedom, to a realistic medium including 2+1 flavor of dynamical degrees of freedom.
The generation of large and fine gauge field configurations for 2+1 flavor QCD with HISQ action together with the well-developed methods to determine spectral and transport properties of light and heavy quarks will allow to provide important physical results, like thermal photon and dilepton rates, heavy quark diffusion coefficients and viscosities, that are relevant for phenomenological and experimental studies in heavy ion experiments and therefore extremely relevant for the heavy ion community.
Olaf Kaczmarek, Bielefeld University, Germany