Quarkonium suppression from SPS to RHIC (and from p+A to A+A)

Abstract

Heavy quarkonia production is expected to be sensitive to the formation of a quark gluon plasma (QGP). It was (and still is with ongoing data analyses) extensively studied at the CERN SPS, at collision energy $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ of the order of 20 GeV. An anomalous suppression was clearly observed. The PHENIX experiment at RHIC has presented preliminary results that exhibit a similar amount of $J/\psi$ suppression, at ten times higher collision energy. I review the results obtained at both facilities. While interpreting and comparing them, the importance of understanding normal nuclear effects is emphasized. A new method to derive a reference for Au+Au collisions from the centrality dependence of d+Au measurements at RHIC is exposed.

Plenary talk given at Hard Probes 2006, June 9-16, 2006, Asilomar, CA, USA; 8 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (8)

• A new measurement of J/psi suppression in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 GeV per nucleon
• Sequential charmonium dissociation
• Centrality Dependence of Charm Production from Single Electrons in Au+Au Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• Momentum spectra of charmonium produced in a quark-gluon plasma
• J/psi Production and Nuclear Effects for d+Au and p+p Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• J/psi transport in QGP and Pt distribution at SPS and RHIC
• J/$\psi$ suppression at $\sqrt{\mathbf{s}}=$ 200 GeV in the comovers interaction model
• PHENIX results on jpsi production in Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=200 GeV