  What is the dynamics of heavy quarks and antiquarks in a quark gluon plasma?
Can heavy-quark bound states dissociate? Can they (re)combine? These questions
are addressed by investigating a Lindblad equation that describes the quantum
dynamics of the heavy quarks in a medium. The Lindblad equations for a heavy
quark and a heavy quark-antiquark pair are derived from the gauge theory,
following a chain of well-defined approximations. In this work the case of an
abelian plasma has been considered, but the extension to the non-abelian case
is feasible. A one-dimensional simulation of the Lindblad equation is performed
to extract information about bound-state dissociation, recombination and
quantum decoherence for a heavy quark-antiquark pair. All these phenomena are
found to depend strongly on the imaginary part of the inter-quark potential.
