Lattice QCD at finite temperature

In recent years considerable progress has been made in understanding QCD at finite temperature using lattice simulations. Calculations of bulk thermodynamic quantities have been done in the realistic case of 2+1 flavors with sufficiently small quark masses using different versions of improved staggered actions [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. This reduces or can even eliminate the uncertainty of extrapolations in the quark mass in different thermodynamics observables. One of the most prominent features of the deconfined phase of QCD is color screening. In non-Abelian gauge theories it is a very complicated phenomenon. Recently some progress in understanding color screening has been made by calculating the free energy of static charges on the lattice [ 6, 7, 8, 9]. For many years lattice QCD did not provide any information on the properties of real time excitations at finite temperature. The situation has changed since few years and first calculations of meson spectral functions at finite temperature appeared [ 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]. In this contribution I am going to review some of these recent developments.