Effective Field Theories of QCD for Heavy Quarkonia at Finite Temperature

Abstract

Quarkonium suppression is one of the most investigated probes of the medium produced in heavy-ion collisions. In this thesis we extend the well-established and successful zero temperature framework of Non-Relativistic (NR) Effective Field Theories (EFTs) (NRQCD, pNRQCD) for the study of heavy quarkonia (production, spectroscopy, decays, ...) to finite temperatures. This is achieved by integrating out in sequence the scales that characterize a NR bound state and those that are typical of a thermal medium, in the possible hierarchies that are relevant for quarkonia in the quark-gluon plasma. Within this framework we show how the potential that governs the evolution of the quark-antiquark pair is derived from QCD in a modern and rigorous way, thereby bridging the gap between phenomenological potential models and QCD. We show how the EFTs can be systematically improved and how effects that cannot be encoded in a potential arise naturally in the EFT, giving rise to new mechanisms of dissociation. We use this EFT framework to compute the spectrum and width of quarkonia in a particular setting that is relevant for the phenomenology of the ground states of bottomonium at the LHC. We also analyze within this framework the correlator of Polyakov loops, which is related to the thermodynamical free energy of heavy quark-antiquark pairs in the medium. As such, lattice computations thereof were frequently used as input for potential models. With our approach we are able to clarify the relation between these free energies and the real-time potential describing the dynamics of quarkonia, finding that the two are different not only in the important imaginary parts, that the former completely lack, but also in the real parts.