Speaker
Elena Gonzalez Ferreiro
(Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (ES))
Description
In nucleus-nucleus collisions, quarkonium production is expected to be significantly suppressed as a consequence of the colour screening of the force that binds the ccbar (bb) state. In this scenario, quarkonium suppression should occur sequentially, according to the binding energy of each state. As a consequence, the in-medium dissociation probability of these states can provide an estimate of the initial temperature reached in the hot and dense strongly-interacting Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) expected to be formed in these collisions. Moreover, at high energy, a new production mechanism could, to some extent, contrast this suppression in the case of charmonium: the abundance of c and cbar quarks might lead to charmonium production by (re)combination of these quarks.
Furthermore, disentangling the hot medium effects requires an accurate study of the so-called cold nuclear matter (CNM) effects, which can be measured in proton-nucleus interactions.
Studies performed for thirty years, first at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at 20 GeV and then at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at 200 GeV, have indeed shown a reduction of the J/psi yield beyond the expectations from cold nuclear matter effects. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), with unprecedented centre-of-mass energies of the order of the TeV in p+Pb and Pb+Pb collisions offers an excellent opportunity to extricate the different effects on J/psi and Y production.
Primary author
Elena Gonzalez Ferreiro
(Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (ES))
