Speaker
Description
Suppression of open heavy flavors and quarkonia in heavy-ion collisions is among the most informative probes of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Interpreting the full wealth of data obtained from the collision events requires a precise understanding of the evolution of heavy quarks and quarkonia as they propagate through the nearly thermal and strongly coupled plasma. Only in the past few years, systematic theoretical studies of quarkonium time evolution in the QGP have been carried out in the regime where the temperature of the QGP is much smaller than the inverse of quarkonium size. Similarly, an analog theoretical treatment is required for heavy dark matter (DM) particle candidates in the early universe, which may also have undergone processes of bound-state formation and dissociation in co-annihilation scenarios that can affect how the present-day DM abundance is explained in terms of the underlying theory.
Such calculations require the evaluation of a gauge-invariant correlator of chromoelectric fields dressed with Wilson lines, which is similar to, but different from, the correlation used to define the well-known heavy quark diffusion coefficient. In this talk, we will describe its calculation at weak coupling in QCD up to next-to-leading order and at strong coupling in $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM using the AdS/CFT correspondence. Furthermore, we will discuss the necessary setup to evaluate the quarkonium transport coefficients from lattice QCD. Finally, we will discuss the phenomenological implications that can be extracted from this correlator, with emphasis on the implications of the novel $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM results at strong coupling.