Sommerfeld effect in heavy quark chemical equilibration
arXiv:1210.6153 · doi:10.1007/JHEP01(2013)037
Abstract
The chemical equilibration of heavy quarks in a quark-gluon plasma proceeds via annihilation or pair creation. For temperatures T much below the heavy quark mass M, when kinetically equilibrated heavy quarks move very slowly, the annihilation in the colour singlet channel is enhanced because the quark and antiquark attract each other which increases their probability to meet, whereas the octet contribution is suppressed. This is the so-called Sommerfeld effect. It has not been taken into account in previous calculations of the chemical equilibration rate, which are therefore incomplete for T < alphas^2 M. We compute the leading-order equilibration rate in this regime; there is a large enhancement in the singlet channel, but the rate is dominated by the octet channel, and therefore the total effect is small. In the course of the computation we demonstrate how operators that represent the annihilation of heavy quarks in non-relativistic QCD can be incorporated into the imaginary-time formalism.
12 pages
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Cited by in corpus (6)
- QCD and strongly coupled gauge theories: challenges and perspectives
- Rapid thermal co-annihilation through bound states in QCD
- On thermal corrections to near-threshold annihilation
- Dark Matter Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation and Bound-state decay at finite temperature
- Charm mass effects in bulk channel correlations
- Non-perturbative Enhancement of Heavy Quark-Antiquark Pair Annihilation in the Quark-Gluon Plasma