Bottomonium suppression and flow in heavy-ion collisions

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent theoretical and computational advances in understanding bottomonium suppression and flow in heavy-ion collisions, highlighting the use of open quantum systems and hydrodynamics to match experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic quantum approach using pNRQCD and Lindblad equations to model bottomonium dynamics in the quark-gluon plasma.

Findings

Predicted bottomonium R_AA and elliptic flow match experimental data.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of quantum trajectories in modeling quarkonium evolution.

Provided insights into the QGP properties through bottomonium observables.

Abstract

The strong suppression of bottomonia production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions is a smoking gun for the creation of a deconfined quark-gluon plasma (QGP). In this proceedings contribution, I review recent work that aims to provide a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of bottomonium dynamics in the QGP through the use of pNRQCD and an open quantum systems approach. This approach allows one to evolve the heavy-quarkonium reduced density matrix, taking into account non-unitary effective Hamiltonian evolution of the wave-function and quantum jumps between different angular momentum and color states. In the case of a strong coupled QGP in which E << T,m_D << 1/a_0, the corresponding evolution equation is Markovian and can therefore be mapped to a Lindblad evolution equation. To solve the resulting Lindblad equation, we make use of a stochastic unraveling called the quantum trajectories algorithm and couple the non-abelian quantum evolution to a realistic 3+1D viscous hydrodynamical background. Using a large number of Monte-Carlo sampled bottomonium trajectories, we make predictions for bottomonium R_AA and elliptic flow as a function of centrality and transverse momentum and compare to data collected by the ALICE, ATLAS, and CMS collaborations.