Decay widths of charmonia in a hot equilibrated medium

Massimo Mannarelli, Floriana Giannuzzi

Published 2009-10-16Version 1

We investigate the properties of charmonia in a thermal medium, showing that with increasing temperature the decay widths of these mesons behave in a non-trivial way. Employing a potential model with interaction potential extracted from thermal lattice QCD calculations of the free-energy of a static quark-antiquark pair, we study some decay processes in the crossover region. We find that at temperatures $T \sim T_c$ the decay widths of the $J/\Psi$ that depend on the value of the wave function at the origin are enhanced with respect to the values in vacuum. In the same temperature range the decay width of the process $\chi_{cJ} \to J/\Psi + \gamma$ is enhanced by approximately a factor 6 with respect to the value in vacuum. At higher temperatures the charmonia states dissociate and the widths of both decay processes become vanishing small.