Effects of initial fluctuations on bottomonia suppression in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Using the screened Cornell potential and the next-to-leading order perturbative QCD to determine, respectively, the properties of bottomonia and their dissociation cross sections in a quark-gluon plasma, we study in a 2 + 1 ideal hydrodynamics the effect of initial fluctuations on bottomonia production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We find that while initial fluctuations hardly affect the yield of the 1S ground state bottomonium, their effect on other bottomonium states gradually increases with their excitation energies. Compared to the case with smooth initial conditions, the survival probabilities of excited bottomonium states are reduced at low transverse momentum in the case of large initial fluctuations, and this effect is more prominent if the bottomonia are produced earlier in heavy-ion collisions. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.