Extraction of the Heavy-Quark Potential from Bottomonium Observables in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Understand

The in-medium color potential is a fundamental quantity for understanding the properties of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (sQGP).

• Open and hidden heavy-flavor (HF) production in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions (URHICs) has been found to be a sensitive probe of this potential.
• Here we utilize a previously developed quarkonium transport approach in combination with insights from open HF diffusion to extract the color-singlet potential from experimental results on $\Upsilon$ production in URHICs.
• Starting from a parameterized trial potential, we evaluate the $\Upsilon$ transport parameters and conduct systematic fits to available data for the centrality dependence of ground and excited states at RHIC and the LHC.