Quarkonium dissociation in a thermal medium

TL;DR

This paper studies how heavy quarkonium states dissociate in a hot plasma due to Debye screening, with a focus on the effects of residual color correlations and the Polyakov loop, revealing increased dissociation temperatures especially for excited states.

Contribution

It introduces a model coupling the light quark sector to a Polyakov loop potential, showing how residual color correlations affect quarkonium dissociation temperatures.

Findings

Residual color correlations increase Mott dissociation temperatures.

Excited quarkonium states are stabilized more than ground states.

The model predicts marginal effects on ground state stability.

Abstract

We investigate the Mott effect for heavy quarkonia due to Debye screening of the heavy quark potential in a plasma of massless quarks and antiquarks. The influence of residual color correlation is investigated by coupling the light quark sector to a temporal gauge field driven by the Polyakov loop potential. This leads to an increase of the Mott dissociation temperatures for quarkonia states which stabilizes in particular the excited states, but has marginal effect on the ground states.