1:30 pm MCP 201
Quarkonium in the QGP: some recent theoretical developments.
Suppression of open heavy flavors and quarkonia in heavy-ion collisions is among the most informative probes of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Only in the past few years, systematic theoretical studies of quarkonium time evolution in the QGP have been carried out in the regime where the temperature of the QGP is much smaller than the inverse of quarkonium size, drawing both from the theory of open quantum systems and recently developed effective field theories.
Such calculations require the evaluation of a gauge-invariant correlator of chromoelectric fields dressed with Wilson lines, which is similar to, but different from, the correlation function used to define the well-known heavy quark diffusion coefficient. In this talk, we will describe its formulation and the steps needed to calculate it at weak coupling in QCD up to next-to-leading order, non-perturbatively in lattice QCD, and at strong coupling in N=4 SYM using the AdS/CFT correspondence. It will be helpful to make comparisons with the open heavy quark diffusion case, to highlight both the similarities and differences, as characterized by the gauge theory correlators that describe each process. Finally, driven by a comparison between the results at weak and strong coupling, we will show that quarkonium inside the QGP may not satisfy the widely used assumption that an open quantum system weakly coupled to a large thermal environment undergoes Markovian dynamics.