Charmonium in a hot, dense medium

TL;DR

This paper develops a thermodynamic Green function approach to study charmonium behavior in hot, dense quark matter, accounting for strong correlations and providing a unified framework for understanding suppression and dissociation.

Contribution

It introduces a plasma Hamiltonian that incorporates strong correlations and resonance effects, advancing the theoretical modeling of in-medium quarkonium modifications.

Findings

The plasma Hamiltonian describes in-medium energy level shifts.

It explains the Mott dissociation effect in a unified way.

The framework allows calculation of quarkonium dissociation rates.

Abstract

In this lecture we apply a thermodynamic Green function formalism developed in the context of nonrelativistic plasma physics for the case of heavy quarkonia states in strongly correlated quark matter. Besides the traditional explanation of charmonium suppresion by Debye screening of the strong interaction, we discuss further effects of relevance when heavy quarkonia states propagate in a medium where strong correlations persist in the form of hadronic resonances. These effects may be absorbed in the definition of a plasma Hamiltonian, which was the main result of this work. This plasma Hamiltonian governs the in-medium modification of the bound state energy levels as well as the lowering of the continuum edge which leads not only to the traditional Mott effect for the dissociation of bound states in a plasma, but can also be applied for a consistent calculation of the in-medium modification of quarkonium dissociation rates.