Quarkonia Disintegration due to time dependence of the $q \bar{q}$ potential in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how rapid changes in the quark-antiquark potential during ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions affect quarkonium survival, revealing potential decay even at low QGP temperatures.

Contribution

It introduces a sudden approximation approach to calculate quarkonium survival probabilities during rapid thermalization in heavy-ion collisions.

Findings

Quarkonium decay can be significant even at low QGP temperatures.

Rapid potential changes impact quarkonium stability beyond conventional melting.

Survival probabilities are computed using time-dependent perturbation theory.

Abstract

Rapid thermalization in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions leads to fast changing potential between a heavy quark and antiquark from zero temperature potential to the finite temperature one. Time dependent perturbation theory can then be used to calculate the survival probability of the initial quarkonium state. In view of very short time scales of thermalization at RHIC and LHC energies, we calculate the survival probability of $J/\psi$ and $\Upsilon$ using sudden approximation. Our results show that quarkonium decay may be significant even when temperature of QGP remains low enough so that the conventional quarkonium melting due to Debye screening is ineffective.