Quarkonium suppression in strongly coupled plasmas

¹ Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA
² InQubator for Quantum Simulation, Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA

^* e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , speaker at HP2024
^** e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Published online: 5 November 2025

Abstract

Suppression of open heavy quarks and quarkonia in heavy-ion collisions are among the most informative probes of quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Interpreting the full wealth of data obtained from the collision events requires a precise theoretical understanding of the evolution of heavy quarks and quarkonia as they propagate through a strongly coupled plasma. Such calculations require the evaluation of a gauge-invariant correlator of chromoelectric fields. This chromoelectric correlator encodes all the characteristics of QGP that the dissociation and recombination dynamics of quarkonium are sensitive to, which is to say can in principle measure. We review its distinctive qualitative features at weak coupling in QCD up to next-to-leading order and at strong coupling in N = 4 SYM using the AdS/CFT correspondence, as well as its formulation in Euclidean QCD. Furthermore, we report on recent progress in applying our results to the calculation of the final quarkonium abundances after propagating through a cooling droplet of QGP, which illustrates how we may learn about QGP from quarkonium measurements. We devote special attention to how the presence of a strongly coupled plasma modifies the transport description of quarkonium, in comparison to approaches that rely on weak coupling approximations to describe quarkonium dissociation and recombination.