Effective potentials for heavy quarks above deconfinement

Understand

Using methods previously developed by Kelbg and others for creating effective potentials for electron-ion plasmas, we investigate quarkonium potentials above deconfinement.

• Using results for the internal energy of a static quark-antiquark pair, a set of effective potentials are constructed that take into account quantum effects and symmetry conditions.
• Bound state effects are explicitly included in order to account for the strongly coupled nature of plasmas.
• It is hoped that these effective potentials will be useful in simulations of heavy quarks or plasma quasiparticles when the dynamics is treated classically.