IISER MOHALI

Abstract: The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in heavy-ion collisions provides an excellent laboratory to study the strong interaction under extreme conditions. Heavy quarkonia (bound states of heavy quark-antiquark pairs) interact with the medium and carry valuable information about its properties. Since the plasma is strongly interacting at the temperatures created in heavy-ion collisions, lattice QCD plays a crucial role in providing theoretical insights into heavy-quark systems. A key challenge, however, is that lattice QCD is formulated in Euclidean time, while the relevant dynamical information requires real-time correlation functions. This requires analytic continuation of lattice QCD data, which is an ill-posed problem. To address this, additional physics input beyond the lattice QCD data is needed, often guided by effective field theories and thermal perturbation theory.
In this talk, I will present how one can perform analytic continuation of lattice QCD data relevant for quarkonia by incorporating such physics-motivated constraints. In particular, I will discuss the survival of quarkonium bound states in the QGP at a given temperature and the extraction of the corresponding thermal potential.