Quarkonium propagation in the quark gluon plasma

Understand

In relativistic heavy ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC, a quark gluon plasma (QGP) is created for a short duration of about 10fm/c.

• Quarkonia (bound states of $c\bar{c}$ and $b\bar{b}$) are sensitive probes of this phase on length scales comparable to the size of the bound states which are less than 1fm.
• Observations of quarkonia in these collisions provide us with a lot of information about how the presence of a QGP affects various quarkonium states.
• This has motivated the development of the theory of heavy quarks and their bound states in a thermal medium, and its application to the phenomenology of quarkonia in heavy ion collisions.