Speaker
Mr
Xiaojun Yao
(Duke University)
Description
The production of heavy quarkonium in heavy ion collisions has been used as an important probe of the quark-gluon plasma. The initial insight was that due to the plasma screening effect, the color attraction between the heavy quark pair is significantly suppressed at high temperature and thus no bound states can exist, i.e., they “melt”. However, experimental measurements have shown that a large amount of quarkonia survived the evolution inside the high temperature plasma. It is realized that the in-medium recombination of unbound heavy quark pairs into quarkonium is as crucial as the quarkonium melting and dissociation. Thus, phenomenological studies using transport equations have to account static screening, dissociation and recombination in a consistent way. In recent years, another approach based on the open quantum system formalism started being used. It is learnt that the dissociation can be understood as a decoherence of the wavefunction of the heavy quark pair. Recombination is automatically included in this framework.
In this talk, I will present a connection between the open quantum system formalism and the transport equation. I will discuss new insights about the quarkonium dynamics inside quark-gluon plasma from the perspective of quantum information. I will show that under the weak coupling and Markovian approximations, the Lindblad equation turns to a Boltzmann transport equation after a Wigner transform is applied to the system density matrix. I will demonstrate how the separation of physical scales justifies the approximations, by using effective field theory of QCD. Finally, I will show some phenomenological results based on the derived transport equation.
Primary author
Mr
Xiaojun Yao
(Duke University)
Co-authors
Prof.
Berndt Mueller
(Duke University)
Prof.
Steffen Bass
(Duke University)
Prof.
Thomas Mehen
(Mehen)
Mr
Weiyao Ke
(Duke University)
Ms
Yingru Xu
(Duke University)
