Color screening and deconfinement for bound states of heavy quarks

Abstract

We study the binding and deconfinement of heavy quarks in a thermal environment, using a non-relativistic confinement potential model with color screening. As a result, we obtain the dependence of the dissociation energies, the binding radii and the masses of heavy quark resonances (charmonium and bottonium states) on the color screening lengthrD of the medium, and we determine for the different resonances those values ofrD below which no more binding is possible. Finally, we consider the implication of our results on resonance suppression as signal for deconfinement.