Coupled Transport Equations for Quarkonium Production in Heavy Ion Collisions

Abstract

Motivated by recent applications of the open quantum system formalism to understand quarkonium transport in the quark-gluon plasma, we develop a set of coupled Boltzmann equations for open heavy quark-antiquark pairs and quarkonia. Our approach keeps track of the correlation between the heavy quark-antiquark pair from quarkonium dissociation and thus is able to account for both uncorrelated and correlated recombination. By solving the coupled Boltzmann equations for current heavy ion collision experiments, we find correlated recombination is crucial to describe the data of bottomonia nuclear modification factors. To further test the importance of correlated recombination in experiments, we propose a new observable: $\frac{R_{AA}[\chi_b(1P)]}{R_{AA}[\Upsilon(2S)]}$. Future measurements of this ratio will help distinguish calculations with and without correlated recombination.