Energy dependence of J/psi absorption in proton-nucleus collisions

Abstract

Charmonium states are expected to be considerably suppressed in the case of quark-gluon plasma formation in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. However, a robust identification of suppression patterns as signatures of a deconfined QCD medium requires a detailed understanding of the "normal nuclear absorption" already present in proton-nucleus collisions, where the charmonium production cross sections increase less than linearly with the number of target nucleons. We analyse the J/psi production cross sections measured in proton-nucleus collisions in fixed target experiments, with proton beam energies from 200 to 920 GeV, and in d-Au collisions at RHIC, at sqrt(s)=200 GeV, in the framework of the Glauber formalism, using several sets of parton distributions with and without nuclear modifications. The results reveal a significant dependence of the "absorption cross section" on the kinematics of the J/psi and on the collision energy. Extrapolating the observed patterns we derive the level of absorption expected at Elab=158 GeV, the energy at which the heavy-ion data sets were collected at the CERN SPS.

23 pages, 11 figures, 7 tables

References in corpus (4)

• Determination of nuclear parton distribution functions and their uncertainties at next-to-leading order
• Heavy Flavour Hadro-Production from Fixed-Target to Collider Energies
• Kinematic distributions and nuclear effects of $J/\psi$ production in 920 GeV fixed-target proton-nucleus collisions
• A systematic study of J/psi suppression in cold nuclear matter

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