Probing the quark-gluon plasma with a new Fermionic correlator

Abstract

We present the first measurement of a new correlation function of fermion bilinears in finite temperature QCD with and without dynamical quarks in a quantum number channel in which nontrivial correlations are known to be present for purely gluonic operators. We find that the fermion correlator vanishes for T≥3T_c/2, in agreement with the expectation for weakly interacting quarks in a quark-gluon plasma.