J/Psi Suppression in Heavy Ion Collisions at the CERN SPS

Abstract

We reexamine the production of J/Psi and other charmonium states for a variety of target-projectile choices at the SPS. For this study we use a newly constructed cascade code LUCIFER II, which yields acceptable descriptions of both hard and soft processes, specifically Drell-Yan and hidden charm production, and soft energy loss and meson production, at the SPS. Glauber calculations of other authors are redone, and compared directly to the cascade results. The modeling of the charmonium states differs from that of earlier workers in its unified treatment of the hidden charm meson spectrum, which is introduced from the outset as a set of coupled states. The result is a description of the NA38 and NA50 data in terms of a conventional hadronic picture. The apparently anomalous suppression found in the most massive Pb+Pb system arises from three sources: destruction in the initial nucleon-nucleon cascade, use of coupled channels to exploit the larger breakup in the less bound Chi and Psi' states, and comover interaction in the final low energy phase.

36 pages (15 figures)

References in corpus (2)

• Charmonium Composition and Nuclear Suppression
• Inelastic $J/\Psi$ Photoproduction off Nuclei: Gluon Enhancement or Double Color Exchange?

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Charm coalescence at relativistic energies
• Charmonium chemistry in A+A collisions at relativistic energies
• Charmonium dynamics in nucleus-nucleus collisions at SPS and FAIR energies
• J/psi Suppression and Enhancement in Au+Au Collisions at the BNL RHIC
• Statistical Coalescence Model Analysis of J/psi Production in Pb+Pb Collisions at 158 A GeV
• B_c meson enhancement and the momentum dependence in Pb+Pb collisions at LHC energy
• The High E_T Drop of J/psi to Drell-Yan Ratio from the Statistical c anti-c Coalescence Model
• Charmonium dynamics in heavy ion collisions
• J/Psi Production by Charm Quark Coalescence
• Towards the Quark Gluon Plasma