The effective complex heavy-quark potential in an anisotropic quark-gluon plasma

¹ Department of Physics, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242, United States
² Department of Physics, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, 541004, China
³ Guangxi Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Technology, Guilin, 541004, China
⁴ School of Physics and Astronomy, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, 519082, China
⁵ Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, NO-4036, Norway

^* e-mail: aislam2@kent.edu

Published online: 22 December 2022

Abstract

We introduce a method for reducing anisotropic heavy-quark potentials to isotropic potentials by using an effective screening mass that depends on the quantum numbers l and m of a given state. We demonstrate that, using the resulting 1D effective potential model, one can solve a 1D Schrödinger equation and reproduce the full 3D results for the energies and binding energies of low-lying heavy-quarkonium bound states to relatively high accuracy. This includes the splitting of different p-wave polarizations. The resulting 1D effective model provides a way to include momentum anisotropy effects in open quantum system simulations of heavy-quarkonium dynamics in the quark-gluon plasma.