Baked Alaska: the Fate of Heavy Quark Bound States inside Quark-gluon Plasma

Heavy quarkonium production in heavy ion collisions has been used as an important probe of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Due to the plasma screening effect, the color attraction is significantly suppressed at high temperature and thus bound states “melt”. However, experiments have shown many quarkonia survived the hot QGP. It is realized that the in-medium recombination of unbound heavy quark pairs is as crucial as the quarkonium melting and dissociation. Thus, phenomenological studies have to account static screening, dissociation and recombination consistently. Transport equations and the open quantum system formalism have been used. In this talk, I will present a connection between them. I will discuss insights about the quarkonium dynamics inside QGP 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. 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.