The bottomonium melting from screening correlators at high temperature

TL;DR

This study investigates how bottomonium states dissolve in a hot quark-gluon plasma by analyzing screening masses across a wide temperature range using lattice QCD with improved quark discretization.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed lattice QCD analysis of bottomonium screening masses over a broad temperature range with multiple lattice spacings to control systematic effects.

Findings

S-wave bottomonium states melt above 500 MeV.

P-wave bottomonium states melt above 350 MeV.

Results indicate sequential melting of bottomonium states with increasing temperature.

Abstract

We study the bottomonium screening masses in a 2+1 flavor QCD medium on the lattice using the Highly Improved Staggered Quark(HISQ) discretization for the quarks. We focus on a wide temperature range in the region $350~{\rm MeV}\le T < 1000 ~{\rm MeV}$, and perform our calculations on three different lattice spacings to control the lattice cut-off effects, corresponding to temporal lattice extent of $N_\tau=8,10,12$. From a detailed study of the temperature dependence of screening masses we conclude that while the $\eta_b(1S)$ and $\Upsilon(1S)$ states melt at $T>500$ MeV, the scalar and axial-vector states $\chi_{b0}(1P)$ and $h_b(1P)$ melt already at $T>350$ MeV.