Holographic entropy and real-time dynamics of quarkonium dissociation in non-Abelian plasma

TL;DR

This paper uses holographic duality to analyze how entropy influences quarkonium dissociation in strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma, revealing rapid dissociation near the deconfinement transition.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic model to study the entropy and real-time dissociation dynamics of heavy quarkonium in non-Abelian plasma, highlighting entropic forces as a key mechanism.

Findings

Entropy peaks at the deconfinement transition.

Dissociation time is less than a fermi near the transition.

Entropic destruction dominates quarkonium dissociation in this regime.

Abstract

The peak of the heavy quark pair entropy at the deconfinement transition, observed in lattice QCD, suggests that the transition is effectively driven by the increase of the entropy of bound states. The growth of the entropy with the inter-quark distance leads to the emergent entropic force that induces dissociation of quarkonium states. Since the quark-gluon plasma around the transition point is a strongly coupled system, we use the gauge-gravity duality to study the entropy of heavy quarkonium and the real-time dynamics of its dissociation. In particular, we employ the Improved Holographic QCD model as a dual description of large $N_c$ Yang Mills theory. Studying the dynamics of the fundamental string between the quarks placed on the boundary, we find that the entropy peaks at the transition point. We also study the real-time dynamics of the system by considering the holographic string falling in the black hole horizon where it equilibrates. In the vicinity the deconfinement transition, the dissociation time is found to be less than a fermi, suggesting that the entropic destruction is the dominant dissociation mechanism in this temperature region.