Data-Driven Analysis for the Bottomonium Potential in the Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

We present a data-driven analysis within a quantum evolutionary microscopic framework to constrain the in-medium bottomonium potential. In relativistic heavy-ion collisions, bottomonium bound states serve as invaluable probes of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) owing to their negligible production in the QGP phase. Meanwhile, their non-relativistic nature allows a straightforward theoretical description via effective field theories such as potential models. Recent lattice QCD calculations of the bottomonium interaction potential have yielded qualitatively distinct results. These discrepancies motivate a data-driven extraction of the potential based on heavy-ion experiments. In this work, we perform a Bayesian analysis to constrain the bottomonium interaction potential. The relationship between potential parameters and observables is established by numerically solving the non-relativistic time-dependent Schr"odinger equation. By comparing these simulations with experimental measurements, our Bayesian framework provides the effective potential that is readily testable in future experiments.