Quarkonium dissociation in perturbative QCD

Abstract

For weakly bound quarkonia, we rederive the next-to-leading order cross sections of quarkonium dissociation by partons that include the hard thermal loop (HTL) resummation. Our results calculated with an effective vertex from the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude reduce to those obtained by potential nonrelativistic QCD (pNRQCD) in the relevant kinematical limit, and they can be used in a wide temperature range applicable to heavy quark systems in heavy ion collisions. Based on the lattice computation of the temperature-dependent binding energy, our numerical analysis on $\Upsilon(1S)$ indicates that at high temperature the dominant mechanism for quarkonium dissociation is inelastic parton scattering as expected in the quasifree approximation, while it is the gluo-dissociation at low temperature. By comparing with the momentum diffusion coefficient of a heavy quark, we discuss possible O(g) corrections to the next-to-leading order thermal width.