title: Thermal width of the upsilon at large 't Hooft coupling.
abstract: We use the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence to show that the heavy quark (static) potential in a strongly coupled plasma develops an imaginary part at finite temperature. Thus, deeply bound heavy quarkonia states acquire a small nonzero thermal width when the 't Hooft coupling lambda = g2N(c) >> 1 and the number of colors N(c) --> infinity. In the dual gravity description, this imaginary contribution comes from thermal fluctuations around the bottom of the classical sagging string in the bulk that connects the heavy quarks located at the boundary. We predict a strong suppression of Upsilon's in heavy-ion collisions and discuss how this may be used to estimate the initial temperature.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Columbia University, 538 West 120 Street, New York, New York 10027, USA.
authors.forename: Jorge
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Noronha
authors.forename: Adrian
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dumitru