Eur. Phys. J. A (2012) 48: 72
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2012-12072-y

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Bottomonia in the quark-gluon plasma and their production at RHIC and LHC

¹ School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, 55414, Minneapolis, MN, USA
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, 50011, Ames, IA, USA
³ Cyclotron Institute and Department of Physics & Astronomy, Texas A&M University, 77843-3366, College Station, TX, USA

^* e-mail: emerick@physics.umn.edu

Received: 7 December 2011
Revised: 4 March 2012
Accepted: 16 April 2012
Published online: 25 May 2012

Abstract

We study the production of bottomonium states in heavy-ion reactions at collider energies available at RHIC and LHC. We employ an earlier constructed rate equation approach which accounts for both suppression and regeneration mechanisms in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) and hadronization phases of the evolving thermal medium. Our previous predictions utilizing two limiting cases of strong and weak bottomonium binding in the QGP are updated by i) checking the compatibility of the pertinent spectral functions with lattice-QCD results for euclidean correlators, ii) adapting the initial conditions of the rate equation by updating bottom-related input cross-sections and the charged-particle multiplicity of the fireball, and iii) converting our calculations into observables as recently measured by the STAR and CMS experiments. Our main findings are a preference for strong ϒ binding as well as a significant regeneration component at the LHC.