Quark Potential in a Quark-Meson Plasma

Abstract: We investigate quark potential by considering meson exchanges in the two flavor Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model at finite temperature and density. There are two kinds of oscillations in the chiral restoration phase, one is the Friedel oscillation due to the sharp quark Fermi surface at high density, and the other is the Yukawa oscillation driven by the complex meson poles at high temperature. The quark-meson plasma is strongly coupled in the temperature region $1\le T/T_c \lesssim 3$ with $T_c$ being the critical temperature of chiral phase transition. The maximum coupling in this region is located at the critical point.