General Lindblad equation for quarkonium evolution in a quark-gluon plasma

Abstract

Accurate modelling and understanding of quarkonium production in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions requires a formalism that preserves the quantum properties of microscopic $\bar{Q}Q$ systems while treating the interaction of such pairs with the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The open quantum system approach has recently emerged as one of the most fruitful schemes to meet such requirements. However, the quantum master equations obtained so far in this context are derived assuming a strict ordering between the QGP temperature $T$ and the $\bar{Q}Q$ energy gaps ($\Delta E$) of the quarkonia bound states. This limits their predictive power since, as the QGP expands and cools down, the system traverse all regimes between the quantum Brownian motion (QBM) regime for $T\gtrsim \Delta E$ to the quantum optical (QO) regime for $\Delta E\gtrsim T$. In this paper, we derive and present a more general non-abelian quantum master equation of the Lindblad type, which does not suffer from these limitations and thus allows to faithfully describe the quantum evolution of the $Q\bar{Q}$ pairs during the whole QGP-evolution. We also provide some illustration of the key quantities governing this equation.