Universal spacing for heavy quarkonium dissociation

When a heavy quark and the corresponding antiquark are separated by more than 1.4 - 1.5 fm, it becomes energetically favorable for a light quark-antiquark pair to be produced, leading to fragmentation into a pair of flavored mesons. It is proposed that this universal quark separation is a fundamental dimensional constant of the strong interactions in the same sense as the pion decay constant, the QCD scale, or the light-quark constituent mass.