Unified Extraction of In-Medium Heavy Quark Potentials from RHIC to LHC Energies via Deep Learning

Abstract

We use deep learning under Bayesian perspective to quantitatively extract the in-medium heavy quark (HQ) potential from bottomonium nuclear modification factors ($R_{AA}$) measured across multiple heavy ion collision systems at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). The in-medium HQ potential, comprising both a real and imaginary part, is parameterized and incorporated into a time-dependent Schrödinger equation to model the wave function evolution of $b\bar{b}$ dipoles within a hydrodynamically evolving hot QCD medium. We construct Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to capture the non-linear correspondence between the heavy quark potential $V(T,r)$ and the bottomonium $R_{AA}$ for Pb-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV and 2.76 TeV, and Au-Au collisions at 200 GeV. Training datasets are generated by sampling the potential parameters and are further augmented using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). After validating the stability and correctness of the CNNs, we employ Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) to perform a simultaneous Bayesian inverse extraction of the optimal potential parameters and their posterior distributions using experimental data of bottomonium $R_{AA}$ in both LHC and RHIC energies. Our joint multi-energy extraction suggests that, within the present parametrization and hydrodynamic background, the real part of the in-medium potential remains close to the vacuum Cornell form, corresponding to a relatively weak screened Debye mass across RHIC to LHC energies. By contrast, the imaginary part is more strongly constrained by the data and provides the dominant contribution to bottomonium suppression from RHIC to LHC energies.