The thermal width of heavy quarkonia moving in quark gluon plasma

Abstract

The velocity dependence of the thermal width of heavy quarkonia traveling with respect to the quark gluon plasma is calculated up to the NLO in perturbative QCD. At the LO, the width decreases with increasing speed, whereas at the NLO it increases with a magnitude approximately proportional to the expectation value of the relative velocity between the quarkonium and a parton in thermal equilibrium. Such an asymptotic behavior is due to the NLO dissociation cross section converging to a nonvanishing value in the high energy limit.