Review of the EFT treatment of quarkonium at finite temperature

TL;DR

This paper reviews how effective field theories derived from QCD are used to understand the behavior and dissociation of heavy quarkonium in hot, dense media like those created in heavy-ion collisions.

Contribution

It summarizes recent progress in applying non-relativistic EFTs to describe quarkonium in-medium dynamics, including potential definitions and comparisons with lattice data.

Findings

Real and imaginary parts of the potential are identified and computed.

EFT approach explains quarkonium dissociation mechanisms.

Comparison with lattice data supports the EFT framework.

Abstract

Heavy quarkonium is one of the most investigated probes of the medium produced in heavy-ion collisions. In the past few years progress has been made in the description of its in-medium dynamics from QCD. Non-relativistic EFTs in particular allow one to define and compute rigorously the potential governing the real-time evolution of the bound state from QCD, showing that it is composed of a real and an imaginary part. The latter encodes the effect of scattering with the light constituents of the plasma and is oftentimes responsible for the dissociation of the bound state. The EFT approach and its main results, as well as comparisons with recent lattice data and phenomenological applications, are briefly reviewed here.