Charmonium properties at high temperatures from lattice QCD

TL;DR

This study uses lattice QCD to analyze charmonium properties at high temperatures, revealing that all states below the open charm threshold persist but gain increasing thermal widths as temperature rises.

Contribution

First lattice QCD investigation of charmonium states at these temperatures using HISQ and Wilson clover actions, highlighting thermal width behaviors.

Findings

All charmonium states below open charm threshold exist up to 305 MeV.

Thermal widths increase with temperature and charmonium size.

Smaller ground states have smaller thermal widths than excited states.

Abstract

We study charmonium properties at non-zero temperature in the temperature range 153 MeV $<T<$ 305 MeV using lattice QCD. We use HISQ action for dynamical quarks and Wilson clover action for valence charm quarks and calculate the correlation function of extended meson operators. Our lattice QCD results are consistent with the existence of all charmonium states below the open charm threshold in this temperature region. However, charmonium states acquire sizable thermal width, which increases with increasing temperature. The size of the thermal width follows the hierarchy of charmonium sizes, i.e. the smaller ground state charmonium has a smaller thermal width than the larger excited charmonia.