Emergence, Formation and Dynamics of Hot QCD Matter

TL;DR

This thesis advances understanding of hot QCD matter by formulating correlation functions for quarkonium in quark-gluon plasma and developing tools to analyze hydrodynamization, revealing sequential energy gap dynamics leading to thermalization.

Contribution

It introduces precise finite-temperature QCD correlation functions for quarkonium dissociation and recombination, and develops a framework to study hydrodynamization via energy gap evolution in QCD kinetic theory.

Findings

Correlation functions enable lattice QCD calculations of quarkonium processes.

Hydrodynamization follows an adiabatic scenario with sequential energy gap closing.

System approaches local thermal equilibrium through a low-energy state evolution.

Abstract

In this thesis, we make progress in two concrete directions in the vast landscape of hot QCD physics. The first one is quarkonium transport inside quark-gluon plasma (QGP), the high temperature phase of QCD. Over the past two decades it has been realized that a significant fraction of quarkonium suppression in high energy heavy ion collisions comes from dynamic dissociation and recombination processes, instead of static screening of the interaction potential as originally proposed by Matsui and Satz. Our contribution is the formulation of the precise correlation functions in QCD at finite temperature that describe the dissociation and recombination processes of heavy quarkonium in QGP, as well as their calculation in weakly coupled QCD and strongly coupled $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. We also formulate the Euclidean version of these correlation functions so that they may be calculated using Lattice QCD techniques. The second contribution we make is the development of tools to understand the process of hydrodynamization in QCD kinetic theory and their application to a simplified description where only a subset of the QCD scattering mechanisms are included. By doing this, we learn that the process of hydrodynamization in this theory, and specifically, how memory of the initial condition is lost, follows the recently proposed Adiabatic Hydrodynamization scenario. Concretely, hydrodynamization proceeds through a sequential process in which a monotonously shrinking set of low-energy states dominate the dynamics, where the opening of an energy gap relative to the ground state(s) signals the start of each stage of this process. The hydrodynamic attractor is reached when only one low-energy state remains as the ground state, and the system approaches local thermal equilibrium following the adiabatic evolution of this low-energy state.