Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics Talk: Formation of Quark-Gluon Plasma and the Dynamics of Quarkonium within it

The hot QCD matter produced in high energy collisions of heavy ions presents a unique challenge to theory and phenomenology due to the vast number of different phenomena that take place in such a collision, and even more so because it is an out-of-equilibrium process. In this talk I will discuss my thesis work, which features novel contributions in two concrete directions in the vast landscape of hot QCD physics. The first is quarkonium transport inside quark-gluon plasma (QGP), the high temperature phase of QCD. Over the past two decades it has been realized that a significant fraction of quarkonium suppression in high energy heavy ion collisions comes from dynamic dissociation and recombination processes. I will show how to formulate and calculate the precise correlation functions in QCD at finite temperature that describe the dissociation and recombination processes of heavy quarkonium in QGP. These results provide the necessary ingredients to carry out an analysis of the suppression of $\Upsilon$ states in heavy ion collisions in terms of the parameters of the QCD Lagrangian. The second is the process of hydrodynamization of hot QCD matter. The dynamics that drives the initial state in a heavy ion collision towards a hydrodynamic QGP is nowadays a topic of active research. I will present a novel theoretical framework to understand the process of hydrodynamization, and its application to kinetic theory descriptions of quarks and gluons.