Charge transport and vector meson dissociation across the thermal phase transition in lattice QCD with two light quark flavors

We compute and analyze correlation functions in the isovector vector channel at vanishing spatial momentum across the deconfinement phase transition in lattice QCD. The simulations are carried out at temperatures T/Tc=0.156, 0.8, 1.0, 1.25 and 1.67 with Tc≃203 MeV for two flavors of Wilson-Clover fermions with a zero-temperature pion mass of ≃270 MeV. Exploiting exact sum rules and applying a phenomenologically motivated Ansatz allows us to determine the spectral function ρ(ω,T) via a fit to the lattice correlation function data. From these results we estimate the electrical conductivity across the deconfinement phase transition via a Kubo formula and find evidence for the dissociation of the ρ meson by resolving its spectral weight at the available temperatures. We also apply the Backus-Gilbert method as a model-independent approach to this problem. At any given frequency, it yields a local weighted average of the true spectral function. We use this method to compare kinetic theory predictions and previously published phenomenological spectral functions to our lattice study.