Bottomonia suppression in heavy-ion collisions

Understand

The thermal suppression of heavy quark bound states represents an ideal observable for determining if one has produced a quark-gluon plasma in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.

• In recent years, a paradigm shift has taken place in the theory of quarkonium suppression due to new first principles calculations of the thermal widths of these states.
• These thermal widths are large, e.g.
• O(20-100 MeV) for the Upsilon(1S), and cause in-medium suppression of the states at temperatures below their traditionally defined disassociation temperatures.