Quarkonium suppression in heavy-ion collisions: an open quantum system approach

Understand

We address the evolution of heavy-quarkonium states in an expanding quark-gluon plasma by implementing effective field theory techniques in the framework of open quantum systems.

• In this setting we compute the nuclear modification factors for quarkonia that are $S$-wave Coulombic bound states in a strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma.
• The calculation is performed at an accuracy that is leading-order in the heavy-quark density expansion and next-to-leading order in the multipole expansion.
• The quarkonium density-matrix evolution equations can be written in the Lindblad form, and, hence, they account for both dissociation and recombination.