Sequential suppression of quarkonia and high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions

TL;DR

This paper questions the common assumption of adiabatic evolution in the sequential suppression model of quarkonia in hot nuclear matter, highlighting potential limitations in current understanding of quarkonium dynamics in high-energy collisions.

Contribution

It critically examines the adiabatic assumption in the sequential suppression model, proposing that this assumption may not always hold in quarkonium evolution during nuclear collisions.

Findings

The adiabatic evolution assumption may not be valid in quarkonium suppression.

Implications for interpreting quarkonium suppression in heavy-ion collisions.

Challenges to existing models of quarkonium dynamics.

Abstract

According to the usual application of the sequential-suppression picture to the dynamics of heavy quarkonia in the hot medium formed in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions, quark-antiquark pairs created in a given bound or unbound state remain in that same state as the medium evolves. We argue that this scenario implicitly assumes an adiabatic evolution of the quarkonia, and we show that the validity of the adiabaticity assumption is questionable.