Coupled Transport Equations for Quarkonium Production in Heavy Ion Collisions

Understand

Motivated by recent applications of the open quantum system formalism to understand quarkonium transport in the quark-gluon plasma, we develop a set of coupled Boltzmann equations for open heavy quark-antiquark pairs and quarkonia.

• Our approach keeps track of the correlation between the heavy quark-antiquark pair from quarkonium dissociation and thus is able to account for both uncorrelated and correlated recombination.
• By solving the coupled Boltzmann equations for current heavy ion collision experiments, we find correlated recombination is crucial to describe the data of bottomonia nuclear modification factors.
• To further test the importance of correlated recombination in experiments, we propose a new observable: $\frac{R_{AA}[\chi_b(1P)]}{R_{AA}[\Upsilon(2S)]}$.