Effective Field Theories for heavy probes in a hot QCD plasma and in the early universe
Escobedo Espinosa, M. (2017). Effective Field Theories for heavy probes in a hot QCD plasma and in the early universe. In Y. Foka, N. Brambilla, & V. Kovalenko (Eds.), XIIth Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum - Proceedings (pp. 01008). EPJ Web of Conferences, 137. EDP Sciences. doi:10.1051/epjconf/201713701008
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Date
2017Copyright
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There are many interesting problems in heavy-ion collisions and in cosmology
that involve the interaction of a heavy particle with a medium. An example is the
dissociation of heavy quarkonium seen in heavy-ion collisions. This was believed to be
due to the screening of chromoelectric fields that prevents the heavy quarks from binding,
however in the last years several perturbative and lattice computations have pointed
out to the possibility that dissociation is due to the finite lifetime of a quarkonium state
inside the medium. Regarding cosmology, the study of the behavior of heavy Majorana
neutrinos in a hot medium is important to understand if this model can explain the origin
of dark matter and the baryon asymmetry. A very convenient way of studying these problems
is with the use of non-relativistic effective field theories (EFTs), this allows to make
the computations in a more systematic way by defining a more suitable power counting
and making it more difficult to miss necessary resummations. In this proceedings I will
review the most important results obtained by applying the EFT formalism to the study
of quarkonium suppression and Majorana neutrinos, I will also discuss how combining
an EFT called potential non-relativistic QCD (pNRQCD) with concepts coming from the
field of open quantum systems it is possible to understand how the population of the
different quarkonium states evolve with time inside a thermal medium.
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