Sequential suppression of quarkonia and high-energy nucleus–nucleus collisions

According to the usual application of the sequential-suppression picture to the dynamics of heavy quarkonia in the hot medium formed in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions, quark–antiquark pairs created in a given bound or unbound state remain in that same state as the medium evolves. We argue that this scenario implicitly assumes an adiabatic evolution of the quarkonia and we show that the validity of the adiabaticity assumption is questionable.