Speaker
Description
Mesons with heavy flavor content are a promising probe of the hot QCD phases produced in heavy-ion collisions. I will present our recent progress on the thermal modification of the properties of heavy mesons in hot mesonic matter. We use a self-consistent theoretical approach that employs an effective field theory based on chiral and heavy-quark spin-flavor symmetries. We apply the imaginary-time formalism to extend to finite temperature the calculation of the unitarized amplitudes of the scattering of the heavy mesons off the light mesons in coupled channels, and dress the heavy mesons with the self-energies [1,2]. We find that the open heavy-flavor ground-state spectral functions broaden and their peak is shifted towards lower energies with increasing temperatures. This has strong implications for the excited mesonic states that are generated dynamically from the heavy-light meson-meson interaction. In addition, I will briefly discuss several applications of our results. The first one corresponds to the calculation of meson Euclidean correlators using the thermal ground-state spectral functions obtained within our approach, and which we have compared with recent calculations of lattice correlators [3]. We have also computed off-shell transport coefficients implementing in-medium scattering amplitudes and the thermal dependence of the heavy-meson spectral properties, and we observe a good matching with lattice QCD data and Bayesian analyses of heavy-ion collision data at the QCD phase transition temperature [4]. Finally, we have recently studied the properties of the exotic X(3872) and X(4014) states, and their bottom counterparts, at finite temperature by incorporating the thermal spectral functions of open heavy-flavor mesons [5]. Being dynamically generated in our approach, we find that these quarkonium-like states show a decreasing mass and acquire an increasing decay width with temperature, following the trend observed in their meson constituents.
[1] G. Montaña, A. Ramos, L. Tolos and J. M. Torres-Rincon, Phys. Lett. B 806 (2020), 135464 doi: 10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135464
[2] G. Montaña, A. Ramos, L. Tolos and J. M. Torres-Rincon, Phys. Rev. D 102 (2020) 9, 096020 doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.102.096020
[3] G. Montaña, O. Kaczmarek, L. Tolos and A. Ramos, Eur. Phys. J. A 56 (2020) 11, 294 doi:10.1140/epja/s10050-020-00300-y
[4] J. M. Torres-Rincon, G. Montaña, A. Ramos and L. Tolos, Phys. Rev. C 105 (2022) 2, 025203 doi:10.1103/PhysRevC.105.025203
[5] G. Montaña, A. Ramos, L. Tolos and J. M. Torres-Rincon, arXiv:2211.01896
