Thermal suppression of moving heavy quark pairs in strongly coupled plasma

TL;DR

This paper calculates how the imaginary part of the potential between moving heavy quark pairs in a strongly coupled plasma is affected by their motion and orientation, revealing that faster movement and alignment influence quarkonium stability.

Contribution

It provides a general holographic framework for computing the imaginary potential of moving heavy quark pairs in strongly coupled plasmas, including explicit formulas for arbitrary orientations.

Findings

Imaginary potential decreases with increasing rapidity.

Quark pairs are more strongly bound when aligned with their motion.

Results are applied to $ ext{AdS}_5$-based $ ext{N}=4$ SYM plasma.

Abstract

The imaginary part of the heavy quark-antiquark potential experienced by moving heavy quarkonia in strongly coupled plasmas dual to theories of gravity is computed by considering thermal worldsheet fluctuations of the holographic Nambu-Goto string. General results for a wide class of gravity duals are presented and an explicit formula for $\mathrm{Im} \, V_{Q\bar{Q}}$ is found in the case where the axis of the moving $\bar{Q}Q$ pair has an arbitrary orientation with respect to its velocity in the plasma. These results are applied to the study of heavy quarkonia propagating through a strongly coupled $\mathcal{N} = 4$ SYM plasma. Our results indicate that the onset of $\mathrm{Im} \, V_{Q\bar{Q}}$ decreases with increasing rapidity (though our analysis is limited to slowly moving quarkonia) and that, in general, a $Q\bar{Q}$ pair is more strongly bound if its axis is aligned with its direction of motion through the strongly coupled plasma.