The effective complex heavy-quark potential in an anisotropic quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

We introduce a method for reducing anisotropic heavy-quark potentials to isotropic potentials by using an effective screening mass that depends on the quantum numbers $l$ and $m$ of a given state. We demonstrate that, using the resulting 1D effective potential model, one can solve a 1D Schr\"odinger equation and reproduce the full 3D results for the energies and binding energies of low-lying heavy-quarkonium bound states to relatively high accuracy. This includes the splitting of different p-wave polarizations. The resulting 1D effective model provides a way to include momentum anisotropy effects in open quantum system simulations of heavy-quarkonium dynamics in the quark-gluon plasma.