Heavy quark potential and quarkonia dissociation rates

Quenched lattice data for the quark-antiquark interaction (in terms of heavy quark free energies) in the color singlet channel at finite temperatures are fitted and used within the nonrelativistic Schroedinger equation formalism to obtain binding energies and scattering phase shifts for the lowest eigenstates in the charmonium and bottomonium systems in a hot gluon plasma. The partial dissociation rate due to the Bhanot-Peskin process is calculated using different assumptions for the gluon distribution function, including free massless gluons, massive gluons, and massive damped gluons. It is demonstrated that a temperature dependent gluon mass has an essential influence on the heavy quarkonia dissociation, but that this process alone is insufficient to describe the heavy quarkonia dissociation rates.