Fate of Heavy Quark Bound States inside Quark-Gluon Plasma

TL;DR

This paper derives a transport equation for heavy quarkonium in quark-gluon plasma from QCD, incorporating screening and recombination effects, and applies it to study Upsilon production in heavy ion collisions.

Contribution

It provides a first-principles derivation of the quarkonium transport equation from QCD using open quantum systems and effective field theory.

Findings

Transport equations successfully describe quarkonium evolution.

Numerical solutions applied to Upsilon production.

Justification of approximations from scale separation.

Abstract

Transport equations have been applied successfully to describe the quarkonium evolution inside the quark-gluon plasma, which include both plasma screening effects and recombination. We demonstrate how the quarkonium transport equation is derived from QCD by using the open quantum system framework and effective field theory. Weak coupling and Markovian approximations used in the derivation are justified from a separation of scales. By solving the equations numerically, we study the Upsilon production in heavy ion collisions.