Quarkonium dissociation in a PNJL quark plasma

TL;DR

This paper studies how heavy quarkonium states dissociate in a quark-gluon plasma using a PNJL model, revealing temperature-dependent stability influenced by color correlations and the Polyakov loop.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled light quark and Polyakov loop model to analyze quarkonium dissociation, highlighting the stabilizing effect on excited states and temperature thresholds for ground state dissociation.

Findings

Mott dissociation temperatures increase with residual color correlation.

Excited quarkonium states are stabilized at higher temperatures.

Ground state dissociation occurs around 200-250 MeV.

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. The temperature dependence of binding energies suggests that the dissciation of the charmonium (bottomonium) ground state by thermal activation sets in at temperatures of 200 MeV (250 MeV).