Using bottomonium production as a tomographic probe of the quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

The suppression of bottomonia in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions is a smoking gun for the production of a strongly interacting final state in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. Furthermore, these final state interactions are consistent with the production of a hot hydrodynamically expanding quark-gluon plasma with initial temperatures on the order of 600-700 MeV at LHC collision energies. Models which incorporate plasma screening and bound-state breakup based on high-temperature quantum chromodynamics are in good agreement with the centrality, transverse-momentum, and rapidity dependence of the suppression seen in the highest energy LHC Pb-Pb collisions. The models of heavy-quark bound state breakup/formation are coupled to the soft dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma using 3+1d relativistic anisotropic hydrodynamics. At later times, excited state feed-down is taken into account using independently constrained excited state feed down fractions. Comparisons with LHC experimental data are consistent with primordial suppression of all bottomonium states, with states having the lowest binding energies being the ones which suffer the most suppression. In this proceedings contribution, I will review recent work to (a) include the effects of regeneration on bottomonium production and (b) to assess the effects of a rapidly changing in-medium potential on bottomonium production in the quark-gluon plasma.