Heavy quark potential in a static and strong homogeneous magnetic field

Abstract We have investigated the properties of quarkonia in a thermal QCD medium in the background of strong magnetic field. For that purpose, we employ the Schwinger proper-time quark propagator in the lowest Landau level to calculate the one-loop gluon self-energy, which in the sequel gives the effective gluon propagator. As an artifact of strong magnetic field approximation ( $$eB>>T^2$$ e B > > T 2 and $$eB>>m^2$$ e B > > m 2 ), the Debye mass for massless flavors is found to depend only on the magnetic field which is the dominant scale in comparison to the scales prevalent in the thermal medium. However, for physical quark masses, it depends on both magnetic field and temperature in a low temperature and high magnetic field but the temperature dependence is very meager and becomes independent of the temperature beyond a certain temperature and magnetic field. With the above mentioned ingredients, the potential between heavy quark (Q) and anti-quark ( $$\bar{Q}$$ Q ¯ ) is obtained in a hot QCD medium in the presence of a strong magnetic field by correcting both short- and long-range components of the potential in the real-time formalism. It is found that the long-range part of the quarkonium potential is affected much more by magnetic field as compared to the short-range part. This observation facilitates us to estimate the magnetic field beyond which the potential will be too weak to bind $$Q\bar{Q}$$ Q Q ¯ together. For example, the $$J/\psi $$ J / ψ is dissociated at $$eB \sim $$ e B ∼ 10 $$m_\pi ^2$$ m π 2 and $$\Upsilon $$ Υ is dissociated at $$eB \sim $$ e B ∼ 100 $$m_\pi ^2$$ m π 2 whereas its excited states, $$\psi ^\prime $$ ψ ′ and $$\Upsilon ^\prime $$ Υ ′ are dissociated at smaller magnetic field $$eB= m_\pi ^2$$ e B = m π 2 , $$13 m_\pi ^2$$ 13 m π 2 , respectively