In-medium heavy-quarkonium from lattice QCD spectral functions

TL;DR

This paper advances the understanding of heavy quarkonium behavior in hot QCD media by developing new lattice QCD methods to extract spectral functions and in-medium potentials, enabling real-time evolution modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel strategy for extracting spectral functions from Euclidean lattice QCD data and computes in-medium spectra and potentials for heavy quarkonium.

Findings

Insights into heavy quarkonium melting in thermal media

Development of a method to extract complex in-medium potentials

Enhanced understanding of quarkonium real-time evolution

Abstract

We discuss recent progress in the study of in-medium heavy quarkonium using first-principles lattice QCD calculations and effective field theory. In particular our focus lies on real-time information carried by QCD spectral functions and we report on a novel strategy for their extraction from Euclidean-time simulations. Combining an effective description for heavy quarks with finite temperature lattice QCD we compute in-medium spectra providing insight in heavy quarkonium melting in a static thermal medium. On the other hand we use spectral information to extract the complex in-medium potential which provides the basis for a dynamical description of quarkonium real-time evolution via the Schr\"odinger equation.