We compute the screening length for quarkonium mesons moving through an anisotropic, strongly coupled N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma by means of its gravity dual. We present the results for arbitrary velocities and orientations of the mesons, as well as for arbitrary values of the anisotropy. The anisotropic screening length can be larger or smaller than the isotropic one, and this depends on whether the comparison is made at equal temperatures or at equal entropy densities. For generic motion we find that: (i) mesons dissociate above a certain critical value of the anisotropy, even at zero temperature; (ii) there is a limiting velocity for mesons in the plasma, even at zero temperature; (iii) in the ultra-relativistic limit the screening length scales as $(1-v^2)^ε$ with ε=1/2, in contrast with the isotropic result ε=1/4.
The real-time dissociation of the heavy quarkonium in a strongly coupled boost-invariant non-Abelian plasma relaxing towards equilibrium is analyzed in a holographic framework. The effects driving the plasma out of equilibrium are described by boundary quenching, impulsive variations of the boundary metric. Quarkonium is represented by a classical string with endpoints kept close to the boundary. The evolution of the string profile is computed in the time-dependent geometry, and the dissociation time is evaluated for different configurations with respect to the direction of the plasma expansio…
The peak of the heavy quark pair entropy at the deconfinement transition, observed in lattice QCD, suggests that the transition is effectively driven by the increase of the entropy of bound states. The growth of the entropy with the inter-quark distance leads to the emergent entropic force that induces dissociation of quarkonium states. Since the quark-gluon plasma around the transition point is a strongly coupled system, we use the gauge-gravity duality to study the entropy of heavy quarkonium and the real-time dynamics of its dissociation. In particular, we employ the Improved Holographic QC…
The quarkonium states in a quark-gluon plasma is examined with the heavy quark potential implied by the holographic principle. Both the vanila AdS-Schwarzschild metric and the one with an infrared cutoff are considered. The dissociation temperature is calculated by solving the Schrö dinger equation of the potential model. In the case of the AdS-Schwarzschild metric with a IR cutoff, the dissociation temperatures for $J/ψ$ and $Υ$ with the U-ansatz of the potential are found to agree with the lattice results within a factor of two.
The relativistic correction of the AdS/CFT implied heavy quark potential is examined within the framework of the potential model. For the typical range of the coupling strength appropriate to heavy-ion collisions, we find the correction is significant in size and lowers the dissociation temperature of quarkonia.
Using the gauge-gravity duality we have obtained the potential between a heavy quark and an antiquark pair, which is moving perpendicular to the direction of orientation, in a strongly-coupled supersymmetric hot plasma. For the purpose we work on a metric in the gravity side, {\em viz.} OKS-BH geometry, whose dual in the gauge theory side runs with the energy and hence proves to be a better background for thermal QCD. The potential obtained has confining term both in vacuum and in medium, in addition to the Coulomb term alone, usually reported in the literature. As the velocity of the pair is …
The entropic approach to dissociation of bound states immersed in strongly coupled systems is developed. In such systems, the excitations of the bound state are often delocalized and characterized by a large entropy, so that the bound state is strongly entangled with the rest of the statistical system. If this entropy $S$ increases with the separation $r$ between the constituents of the bound state, $S = S(r)$, then the resulting entropic force $F = T\ {\partial S}/{\partial r}$ ($T$ is temperature) can drive the dissociation process. As a specific example, we consider the case of heavy quarko…
We continue the study of a recently constructed holographic QCD model supplemented with magnetic field. We consider the holographic dual of a quark, anti-quark pair and investigate its entropy beyond the deconfinement phase transition in terms of interquark distance, temperature and magnetic field. We obtain a clear magnetic field dependence in the strongly decreasing entropy near deconfinement and in the entropy variation for growing interquark separation. We uncover various supporting evidences for inverse magnetic catalysis. The emergent entropic force is found to become stronger with magne…
In the early stages of heavy-ion collisions, the hot QCD matter expands more longitudinally than transversely. This imbalance causes the system to become rapidly colder in the longitudinal direction and a local momentum anisotropy appears. In this paper, we study the heavy-quarkonium spectrum in the presence of a small plasma anisotropy. We work in the framework of pNRQCD at finite temperature. We inspect arrangements of non-relativistic and thermal scales complementary to those considered in the literature. In particular, we consider temperatures larger and Debye masses smaller than the bindi…
Previous research has shown that the peak of the quarkonium entropy at the deconfinement transition would be related to the entropic force which induces the melting of quarkonium. In this article, we study the effect of backreaction on the entropic force in a strongly coupled plasma of adjoint matter. The backreaction covered here comes from the presence of static heavy quarks evenly distributed over such a plasma. It is found that the inclusion of backreaction increases the entropic force thus enhancing the quarkonium dissociation, in accord with the findings of the imaginary potential.
Heavy vector mesons detected after a heavy ion collision are important sources of information about the quark gluon plasma. The fraction of such particles that survive the plasma phase and reach the detectors is related to the dissociation degree inside the thermal medium. A consistent picture for the thermal behavior of charmonium and bottomonium quasi-states in a thermal medium was obtained recently using a holographic bottom up model. This model captures the heavy flavour spectroscopy of masses and decay constants in the vacuum (zero temperature) and is consistently extended to finite tempe…
The imaginary potential and entropic force are two important different mechanisms to characterize the dissociation of heavy quarkonia. In this paper, we calculate these two quantities in strongly coupled theories with anisotropic Lifshitz scaling and hyperscaling violation exponent using holographic methods. We study how the results are affected by the hyperscaling violation parameter θ and the dynamical exponent z at finite temperature and chemical potential. Also, we investigate the effect of the chemical potential on these quantities. As a result, we find that both mechanisms show the same …
We revisit holographic mesons in the D4/D6 model to study holographic light vector mesons and the properties of heavy quarkonium in confining and deconfining phases. To treat the light mesons and heavy quarkonium on the same footing, we use the same compactification scale MKK in both systems. We observe that like scalar and pseudo-scalar mesons the vector meson mass is linearly proportional to the square root of the quark mass, when the quark mass is large. With a MKK fixed by light meson masses, we calculate the mass of heavy quarkonium in confining and deconfining phases. We also obtain the …
For a moving heavy quark antiquark ($Q\bar{Q}$) in a quark gluon plasma (QGP), we use gauge/gravity duality to study both real and imaginary parts of the potential (Re$V_{Q\bar{Q}}$ and Im$V_{Q\bar{Q}}$ respectively) in a gluon condensate (GC) theory. The complex potential is derived from the Wilson loop by considering the thermal fluctuations of the worldsheet of the Nambu-Goto holographic string. We calculate Re$V_{Q\bar{Q}}$ and Im$V_{Q\bar{Q}}$ in both cases where the axis of the moving $Q\bar{Q}$ pair is transverse and parallel with respect to its direction of movement in the plasma. Usin…
We study the dispersion relations of mesons in a particular hot strongly coupled supersymmetric gauge theory plasma. We find that at large momentum k the dispersion relations become omega = v_0 k + a + b/k + ..., where the limiting velocity v_0 is the same for mesons with any quantum numbers and depends only on the ratio of the temperature to the quark mass T/m_q. We compute a and b in terms of the meson quantum numbers and T/m_q. The limiting meson velocity v_0 becomes much smaller than the speed of light at temperatures below but close to T_diss, the temperature above which no meson bound st…
In the recent years many examples appeared in the literature where the configuration entropy (CE), introduced by Gleiser and Stamatopoulos, plays the role of an indicator of stability of physical systems. It was observed that, comparing states of the same system, the lower is the value of the CE, the more stable is the state. In this work we investigate the behaviour of the differential configuration entropy (DCE) , that is appropriate for systems with continuous degrees of freedom, in a new context. We consider quasi-states of quarkonium (a vector meson made of a heavy quark anti-quark pair) …
Recent investigations show that the thermal spectral function of heavy $ {b \bar b } $ and $ {c \bar c} $ vector mesons can be described using holography. These studies consider a bottom up model that captures the heavy flavour spectroscopy of masses and decay constants in the vacuum and is consistently extended to finite temperature. The corresponding spectral functions provide a picture of the dissociation process in terms of the decrease of the quasi-state peaks with temperature. Another related tool that provides important information about the thermal behaviour is the analysis of the quas…
We consider five-dimensional AdS-axion-dilaton gravity with a Gauss-Bonnet term and use a black brane solution displaying spatial anisotropy as the gravity dual of a strongly coupled anisotropic plasma. We compute several observables relevant to the study of the plasma, namely, the drag force, the jet quenching parameter, the quarkonium potential and the thermal photon production. The effects of higher derivative corrections and of the anisotropy are discussed and compared with previous results.
There are strong indications that ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, produced in accelarators, lead to the formation of a new state of matter: the quark gluon plasma (QGP). This deconfined QCD matter is expected to exist just for very short times after the collision. All the information one can get about the plasma is obtained from the particles that reach the detectors. Among them, heavy vector mesons are particularly important. The abundance of $ c {\bar c}$ and $b {\bar b}$ states produced in a heavy ion collision is a source of information about the plasma. In contrast to the light m…
We use gauge/gravity duality to investigate the effect of thermal fluctuations on the dissociation of the quarkonium meson in strongly coupled $(3+1)$-dimensional gauge theories. This is done by studying the instability and probable first order phase transition of a probe D7-brane in the dual gravity theory. We explicitly show that for the Minkowski embeddings with their tips close to the horizon in the background, the long wavelength thermal fluctuations lead to an imaginary term in their action signaling an instability in the system. Due to this instability, a phase transition is expected. O…
