Entropic destruction of heavy quarkonium in non-Abelian plasma from holography

Abstract

Lattice QCD indicates a large amount of entropy associated with the heavy quark-antiquark pair immersed in the quark-gluon plasma. This entropy grows as a function of the inter-quark distance giving rise to an entropic force that can be very effective in dissociating the bound quarkonium states. In addition, the lattice data show a very sharp peak in the heavy quark-antiquark entropy at the deconfinement transition. Since the quark-gluon plasma around the deconfinement transition is strongly coupled, we employ the holographic correspondence to study the entropy associated with the heavy quark-antiquark pair in two theories: i) ${\cal{N}}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills and ii) a confining Yang-Mills theory obtained by compactification on a Kaluza-Klein circle. In both cases we find the entropy growing with the inter-quark distance and evaluate the effect of the corresponding entropic forces. In the case ii), we find a sharp peak in the entropy near the deconfinement transition, in agreement with the lattice QCD results. This peak in our holographic description arises because the heavy quark pair acts as an eyewitness of the black hole formation in the bulk -- the process that describes the deconfinement transition. In terms of the boundary theory, this entropy likely emerges from the entanglement of a "long string" connecting the quark and antiquark with the rest of the system.