Heavy meson dissociation in a plasma with magnetic fields

TL;DR

This paper extends a holographic model to study how strong magnetic fields in heavy ion collisions affect the dissociation of heavy mesons like charmonium and bottomonium in a thermal plasma.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic approach incorporating magnetic fields to analyze heavy meson spectral functions at finite temperature.

Findings

Magnetic fields influence the dissociation temperature of heavy mesons.

Spectral peaks shift with increasing magnetic field strength.

The model predicts altered meson stability in magnetized plasmas.

Abstract

The fraction of heavy vector mesons detected after a heavy ion collision provides information about the possible formation of a plasma state. An interesting framework for estimating the degree of dissociation of heavy mesons in a plasma is the holographic approach. It has been recently shown that a consistent picture for the thermal behavior of charmonium and bottomonium states in a thermal medium emerges from holographic bottom up models. A crucial ingredient in this new approach is the appropriate description of decay constants, since they are related to the heights of the quasiparticle peaks of the finite temperature spectral function. Here we extend this new holographic model in order to study the effect of magnetic fields on the thermal spectrum of heavy mesons. The motivation is that very large magnetic fields are present in non central heavy ion collisions and this could imply a change in the dissociation scenario. The thermal spectra of $ c \bar c$ and $ b \bar b \, $ S wave states is obtained for different temperatures and different values of the magnetic $e B$ field.