Speaker
Description
In recent years the problem of bound-state formation in hot and dense medium in has become of high
interest in heavy-ion-collision theory due to the discovery at the LHC that the production rate of
light nuclei in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions follows the statistical hadronization model with
abundancies consistent with the conditions at chemical freeze-out. Despite the small binding energies,
e.g., deuterons seem to be formed at a temperature of about 155 MeV.
In this work the problem is addressed within a non-relativistic quantum mechanical toy model applying
the Kadanoff-Baym many-body real-time contour approach to a particle moving in a potential, leading
to one or a few bound states in the vacuum, within a thermal bath. It is demonstrated that such a
model, following the properties of such Φ-derivable approximations, leads via rapid decoherence to the
proper equilibration of the particle with the heat bath and provides the full spectral information of the
one-particle state.