Fate of Heavy Quark Bound States inside Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

Transport equations have been applied successfully to describe the quarkonium evolution inside the quark-gluon plasma, which include both plasma screening effects and recombination. We demonstrate how the quarkonium transport equation is derived from QCD by using the open quantum system framework and effective field theory. Weak coupling and Markovian approximations used in the derivation are justified from a separation of scales. By solving the equations numerically, we study the Upsilon production in heavy ion collisions.