The effect of anisotropy on the formation of heavy quarkonium bound states

Abstract

We study the real part of the static potential of a heavy quark-antiquark system in an anisotropic plasma medium. We use a quasi-particle approach where the collective dynamics of the plasma constituents is described using hard-loop perturbation theory. The parton distribution function is characterized by a set of parameters that can accurately describe the anisotropy of the plasma produced in a heavy ion collision. We calculate the potential numerically in strongly anisotropic systems and study the angular dependence of the distortion of the potential relative to the isotropic one. We obtain an analytic expression for the real part of the heavy quark potential in the limit of weak anisotropy using a model that expresses the potential in terms of effective screening masses that depend on the anisotropy parameters and the orientation of the quark-antiquark pair. A 1-dimensional potential is formulated in terms of angle averaged screening masses that incorporate the anisotropy of the medium into a radial coordinate. We solve the corresponding Schr\"odinger equation and show that the magnitude of the binding energy typically increases with anisotropy. Anisotropy can play an important role, especially in states with non-zero angular momentum. This means that the number of bound states that are formed could depend on specific characteristics of the anisotropy of the plasma. Our study suggests that plasma anisotropy plays an important role in the dynamics of heavy quarkonium and motivates further study.