  Previous studies have shown that a gauge-invariant correlation function of
two chromoelectric fields connected by a straight timelike adjoint Wilson line
encodes crucial information about quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that determines the
dynamics of small-sized quarkonium in the medium. Motivated by the successes of
holographic calculations to describe strongly coupled QGP, we calculate the
analog gauge-invariant correlation function in strongly coupled $\mathcal{N}=4$
supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature by using the AdS/CFT
correspondence. Our results indicate that the transition processes between
bound and unbound quarkonium states are suppressed in strongly coupled plasmas,
and moreover, the leading contributions to these transition processes vanish in
both the quantum Brownian motion and quantum optical limits of open quantum
system approaches to quarkonia.
