Fate of in-medium heavy quarks via a Lindblad equation

Understand

What is the dynamics of heavy quarks and antiquarks in a quark gluon plasma? Can heavy-quark bound states dissociate? Can they (re)combine? These questions are addressed by investigating a Lindblad equation that describes the quantum dynamics of the heavy quarks in a medium.

• The Lindblad equations for a heavy quark and a heavy quark-antiquark pair are derived from the gauge theory, following a chain of well-defined approximations.
• In this work the case of an abelian plasma has been considered, but the extension to the non-abelian case is feasible.
• A one-dimensional simulation of the Lindblad equation is performed to extract information about bound-state dissociation, recombination and quantum decoherence for a heavy quark-antiquark pair.