Dissociation of quarkonium in a hot QCD medium: Modification of the interquark potential

Abstract

We have studied the dissociation of heavy quarkonium states in a hot QCD medium by investigating the medium modifications to a heavy quark potential. Our model shows that in-medium modification causes the screening of the charge in contrast to the screening of the range of the potential. We have then employed the medium-modified potential to estimate the dissociation pattern of the charmonium and bottomonium states and also explore how the pattern changes as we go from the perturbative to nonperturbative domain in the Debye mass. The results are in good agreement with the other current theoretical works both from the spectral function analysis and the potential model study.