Properties of charmonia in a hot equilibrated medium

Abstract

We investigate the properties of charmonia in a thermal medium, showing that with increasing temperature the decay widths of these mesons behave in a non-trivial way. Our analysis is based on a potential model with interaction potential extracted from thermal lattice QCD calculations of the free-energy of a static quark-antiquark pair. We find that in the crossover region some decay widths are extremely enhanced, which might be interpreted as a signature of the transition from hadronic matter to the deconfined phase. In particular, at temperatures $T\sim T_c$ the decay widths of the $J/\Psi$ that depend on the value of the wave function at the origin are enhanced with respect to the values in vacuum by about a factor 2. In the same temperature range the decay width of the process $\chi_{c J} \to J/\Psi + \gamma$ is enhanced by approximately a factor 6 with respect to the value in vacuum. At higher temperatures the charmonia states dissociate and the widths of both decay processes become vanishing small.