Effective Field Theories for heavy probes in a hot QCD plasma and in the early universe

¹ Institut de Physique Théorique, Université Paris Saclay, CNRS, CEA, F-91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
² Department of Physics, P.O. Box 35, 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland

^a e-mail: miguel.a.escobedo-espinosa@jyu.fi

Published online: 22 March 2017

Abstract

There are many interesting problems in heavy-ion collisions and in cosmology that involve the interaction of a heavy particle with a medium. An example is the dissociation of heavy quarkonium seen in heavy-ion collisions. This was believed to be due to the screening of chromoelectric fields that prevents the heavy quarks from binding, however in the last years several perturbative and lattice computations have pointed out to the possibility that dissociation is due to the finite lifetime of a quarkonium state inside the medium. Regarding cosmology, the study of the behavior of heavy Majorana neutrinos in a hot medium is important to understand if this model can explain the origin of dark matter and the baryon asymmetry. A very convenient way of studying these problems is with the use of non-relativistic effective field theories (EFTs), this allows to make the computations in a more systematic way by defining a more suitable power counting and making it more difficult to miss necessary resummations. In this proceedings I will review the most important results obtained by applying the EFT formalism to the study of quarkonium suppression and Majorana neutrinos, I will also discuss how combining an EFT called potential non-relativistic QCD (pNRQCD) with concepts coming from the field of open quantum systems it is possible to understand how the population of the different quarkonium states evolve with time inside a thermal medium.