Color Screening and the Suppression of the Charmonium State Yield in Nuclear Reactions

Abstract

We discuss the new data for the production of the ${\psi }^{\prime }$ meson in pA collisions at 450 GeV at CERN-SPS (of the NA50-collaboration) [1]. We extract from the CERN data $\sigma ({\psi }^{\prime }N)\approx 8$ mb under the assumption that the ${\psi }^{\prime }$ is produced as a result of the space-time evolution of a point-like $c\bar{c}$ pair which expands with time to the full size of the charmonium state. In the analysis we assume the existence of a relationship between the distribution of color in a hadron and the cross section of its interaction with a nucleon. However, our result is rather sensitive to the pattern of the expansion of the wave packet and significantly larger values of $\sigma ({\psi }^{\prime }N)$ are not ruled out by the data. We show that recent CERN data confirm the suggestion of [2] that color fluctuations of the strengths in charmonium-nucleon interaction are the major source of suppression of the $J/\psi$ yield as observed at CERN in both pA and AA collisions.

arXiv comment10 pages, 5 figures (one with color)

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Color Screening and Regeneration of Bottomonia in High-Energy Heavy-Ion Collisions
• $\varphi$ and $\Omega$ production in relativistic heavy ion collisions in a dynamical quark coalescence model
• The extraction of the bare triple-Pomeron vertex; a crucial ingredient for diffraction
• Charm production in antiproton-nucleus collisions at the $J/\psi$ and the ${\psi }^{\prime }$ thresholds
• Charmonium interaction in nuclear matter at FAIR
• Charm Production in $\bar{p}A$-Collisions at the Charmonium Threshhold