Paper detail

Towards the Gravity Dual of Quarkonium in the Strongly Coupled QCD Plasma

We build a "bottom-up" holographic model of charmonium by matching the essential spectral data. We argue that this data must include not only the masses but also the decay constants of the J/psi and psi' mesons. Relative to the "soft-wall" models for light mesons, such a matching requires two new features in the holographic potential: an overall upward shift as well as a narrow "dip" near the holographic boundary. We calculate the spectral function as well as the position of the complex singularities (quasinormal frequencies) of the retarded correlator of the charm current at finite temperatures. We further extend this analysis by showing that the residues associated with these singularities are given by the boundary derivative of the appropriately normalized quasinormal mode. We find that the "melting" of the J/psi spectral peak occurs at a temperature of about 540 MeV, or 2.8 T_c, in good agreement with lattice results.