Color Screening Melts Quarkonium

TL;DR

This paper uses lattice QCD data to model quarkonium spectral functions in a quark-gluon plasma, estimating their stability and dissociation temperatures, which are lower than previously thought.

Contribution

It introduces a potential model based on lattice QCD calculations to accurately estimate quarkonium dissociation temperatures in a hot plasma.

Findings

Quarkonium states have lower dissociation temperatures than previously estimated.

The potential model provides a new way to analyze quarkonium stability in QGP.

Thermal widths of quarkonium states are quantitatively estimated.

Abstract

We calculate quarkonium spectral functions in a quark-gluon plasma using a potential model based on full QCD lattice calculations of the free energy of static quark-antiquark pair. We estimate the binding energy and the thermal width of different quarkonium states. The estimated upper limit for the dissociation temperatures is considerably lower than the ones suggested in the recent literature.