Deconfinement as an entropic self-destruction: a solution for the quarkonium suppression puzzle?

The entropic approach to dissociation of bound states immersed in strongly coupled systems is developed. In such systems, the excitations of the bound state are often delocalized and characterized by a large entropy, so that the bound state is strongly entangled with the rest of the statistical system. If this entropy $S$ increases with the separation $r$ between the constituents of the bound state, $S = S(r)$, then the resulting entropic force $F = T\ {\partial S}/{\partial r}$ ($T$ is temperature) can drive the dissociation process. As a specific example, we consider the case of heavy quarkonium in strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma, where lattice QCD indicates a large amount of entropy associated with the heavy quark pair at temperatures $0.9\ T_c \leq T \leq 1.5\ T_c$ ($T_c$ is the deconfinement temperature); this entropy $S(r)$ grows with the inter-quark distance $r$. We argue that the entropic mechanism results in an anomalously strong quarkonium suppression in the temperature range near $T_c$. This "entropic self-destruction" may thus explain why the experimentally measured quarkonium nuclear modification factor at RHIC (lower energy density) is smaller than at LHC (higher energy density), possibly resolving the "quarkonium suppression puzzle" - all of the previously known mechanisms of quarkonium dissociation operate more effectively at higher energy densities, and this contradicts the data. Moreover, we find that near $T_c$ the entropic force leads to delocalization of the bound hadron states; we argue that this delocalization may be the mechanism underlying deconfinement.