Heavy quark master equations in the Lindblad form at high temperatures

Abstract

We derive the quantum master equations for heavy quark systems in a high-temperature quark- gluon plasma in the Lindblad form. The master equations are derived in the influence functional formalism for open quantum systems in perturbation theory. These master equations have a wide range of applications, such as decoherence of a heavy quarkonium and Langevin dynamics of a heavy quark in the quark-gluon plasma. We also show the equivalence between the quarkonium master equations in the recoilless limit and the Schroedinger equations with stochastic potential.