Quarkonium dissociation in a thermal medium

Abstract

We investigate the Mott effect for heavy quarkonia due to Debye screening of the heavy quark potential in a plasma of massless quarks and antiquarks. The influence of residual color correlation is investigated by coupling the light quark sector to a temporal gauge field driven by the Polyakov loop potential. This leads to an increase of the Mott dissociation temperatures for quarkonia states which stabilizes in particular the excited states, but has marginal effect on the ground states.