Quarkonium transport in weakly and strongly coupled plasmas

¹ Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, CH-1211 Genève 23, Switzerland
² Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
³ InQubator for Quantum Simulation, Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA

^* e-mail: govert.nijs@cern.ch
^** e-mail: bscheihi@mit.edu, speaker at QM 2023
^*** e-mail: xjyao@uw.edu

Published online: 26 June 2024

Abstract

We report on progress in the nonperturbative understanding of quarkonium dynamics inside a thermal plasma. The time evolution of small-size quarkonium is governed by two-point correlation functions of chromoelectric fields dressed with an adjoint Wilson line, known in this context as generalized gluon distributions (GGDs). The GGDs have been calculated in both weakly and strongly coupled plasmas by using perturbative and holographic methods. Strikingly, the results of our calculations for a strongly coupled plasma indicate that the quarkonium dissociation and recombination rates vanish in the transport descriptions that assume quarkonium undergoes Markovian dynamics. However, this does not imply that the dynamics is trivial. As a starting point to explore the phenomenological consequences of the result at strong coupling, we show a calculation of the ϒ(1S) formation probability in time-dependent perturbation theory. This is a first step towards the development of a transport formalism that includes non-Markovian effects, which, depending on how close the as of yet undetermined nonperturbative QCD result of the GGDs is to the strongly coupled N = 4 SYM result, could very well dominate over the Markovian ones in quark-gluon plasma produced at RHIC and the LHC.