Bottomonium: from hadronic phase to QGP

by Maria Paola Lombardo (INFN LNF)

Thursday 31 Mar 2011, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Seminari Edif. Alte Energie (Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati)

Quarkonia - bound states of heavy quarks - are an important probe of the dynamics of strong interactions. The forces responsibile for their binding are weakened by the medium, due to enhanced screening, till the quarkonia ultimately melt. Quarkonia states have then been advocated as 'termometers' of the quark gluon plasma. Lattice calculations in principle allow a rigorous study of these phenomena. In practice, however, they are plagued by several uncertainties. In this talk I briefly review the main problems encountered by previous studies, illustrate our new approach, argue that it overcomes previous limitations and present our results for bottomonium in the temperature range 0.4Tc < T < 2.1 Tc