Thermal Broadening of Bottomonia: Lattice Non-Relativistic QCD with Extended Operators

TL;DR

This study uses lattice non-relativistic QCD with extended operators to analyze bottomonium states at high temperatures, revealing significant thermal broadening of ground state bottomonia in a realistic QCD environment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel lattice NRQCD approach with extended operators to investigate bottomonium spectral functions at finite temperature.

Findings

Evidence of significant thermal broadening of bottomonia

Compatibility with in-medium modifications of bottomonium states

Analysis based on spectral function parameterizations

Abstract

We present lattice non-relativistic QCD calculations of bottomonium correlation functions at temperatures $T \simeq 150-350$ MeV. The correlation functions were computed using extended bottomonium operators, and on background gauge-field configurations for 2+1-flavor QCD having physical kaon and nearly-physical pion masses. We analyzed these correlation functions based on simple theoretically-motivated parameterizations of the corresponding spectral functions. The results of our analyses are compatible with significant in-medium thermal broadening of the ground state S- and P-wave bottomonia.