  The thermal width of heavy-quarkonium bound states in a quark-gluon plasma
has been recently derived in an effective field theory approach. Two phenomena
contribute to the width: the Landau damping phenomenon and the break-up of a
colour-singlet bound state into a colour-octet heavy quark-antiquark pair by
absorption of a thermal gluon. In the paper, we investigate the relation
between the singlet-to-octet thermal break-up and the so-called
gluo-dissociation, a mechanism for quarkonium dissociation widely used in
phenomenological approaches. The gluo-dissociation thermal width is obtained by
convoluting the gluon thermal distribution with the cross section of a gluon
and a 1S quarkonium state to a colour octet quark-antiquark state in vacuum, a
cross section that at leading order, but neglecting colour-octet effects, was
computed long ago by Bhanot and Peskin. We will, first, show that the effective
field theory framework provides a natural derivation of the gluo-dissociation
factorization formula at leading order, which is, indeed, the singlet-to-octet
thermal break-up expression. Second, the singlet-to-octet thermal break-up
expression will allow us to improve the Bhanot--Peskin cross section by
including the contribution of the octet potential, which amounts to include
final-state interactions between the heavy quark and antiquark. Finally, we
will quantify the effects due to final-state interactions on the
gluo-dissociation cross section and on the quarkonium thermal width.
