Fate of in-medium heavy quarks via a Lindblad equation

Abstract What is the dynamics of heavy quarks and antiquarks in a quark gluon plasma? Can heavy-quark bound states dissociate? Can they (re)combine? These questions are addressed by investigating a Lindblad equation that describes the quantum dynamics of the heavy quarks in a medium. The Lindblad eq...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Davide De Boni
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2017-08-01
Series:Journal of High Energy Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP08(2017)064
Description
Summary:Abstract What is the dynamics of heavy quarks and antiquarks in a quark gluon plasma? Can heavy-quark bound states dissociate? Can they (re)combine? These questions are addressed by investigating a Lindblad equation that describes the quantum dynamics of the heavy quarks in a medium. The Lindblad equations for a heavy quark and a heavy quark-antiquark pair are derived from the gauge theory, following a chain of well-defined approximations. In this work the case of an abelian plasma has been considered, but the extension to the non-abelian case is feasible. A one-dimensional simulation of the Lindblad equation is performed to extract information about bound-state dissociation, recombination and quantum decoherence for a heavy quark-antiquark pair. All these phenomena are found to depend strongly on the imaginary part of the inter-quark potential.
ISSN:1029-8479