Debye screening in the QCD gluonic plasma

Studies on the static screening effect in a pure gluon plasma by an extensive numerical simulation of lattice QCD is reported here. The simulation is done on a $24\times 24\times 24\times N_t$ lattice with $N_t=4,6,16\mathrm{}$ at various temperatures above the phase transition. Our results show that the hot gluon plasma fits a Debye-screening picture very well and the potential for each representation of a $q\overline{q}$ pair system is of Yukawa-type potential. Also, accidentally, we find that the potential tends to agree with the naive "lowest-order perturbative prediction" when $T$ becomes much larger than $T_c$.