Thermal width and quarkonium dissociation by inelastic parton scattering

Understand

In a weak-coupling effective field theory framework we study quarkonium dissociation induced by inelastic scattering with partons in the medium.

• This is the dominant dissociation process for temperatures such that the Debye mass is larger than the binding energy.
• We evaluate the dissociation cross section and the corresponding thermal decay width.
• At leading order we derive a convolution formula relating the two, which is consistent with the optical theorem and QCD at finite temperature.