Heavy Quarkonium in the Quark Gluon Plasma from Effective Field Theories and Potentials

Abstract

The measurements of heavy quarkonium suppression at RHIC and LHC urge theory to develop intuitive as well as quantitative methods for the description of $Q\bar{Q}$ melting in the quark-gluon plasma. Here I will present a brief sketch on the effective field theory strategies underlying the definition of the heavy quark static potential and report on two recent advances in the extraction and interpretation of such a potential. On the one side, progress has been made in obtaining its values from lattice QCD, which promises to make possible investigating its real and imaginary part non-perturbatively. On the other side, the existence of an imaginary part emphasizes the dynamical nature of the melting process and invites us to make a direct connection to the framework of open quantum systems.

Talk given at the 5th International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions 2012, to be published in Nucl. Phys. A, 8 pages, 1 figure, (v2 replaced one reference, corrected typos)