On the theoretical and experimental uncertainties in the extraction of the J/psi absorption cross section in cold nuclear matter

A Rakotozafindrabe (1) , E G Ferreiro , F Fleuret (2) , J P Lansberg (3)

1 DPHN - Département de Physique Nucléaire (ex SPhN)
2 LLR - Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet
3 CPHT - Centre de Physique Théorique [Palaiseau]

We investigate the cold nuclear matter effects on J/ψ production, whose understanding is fundamental to study the quark-gluon plasma. Two of these effects are of particular relevance: the shadowing of the parton distributions and the nuclear absorption of the c¯ c pair. If J/ψ's are not produced via a 2 → 1 process as suggested by recent theoretical works, one has to modify accordingly the way to compute the nuclear shadowing. This naturally induces differences in the absorption cross-section fit to the data. A careful analysis of these differences however requires taking into account the experimental uncertainties and their correlations, as done in this work for dAu collisions at √ s N N = 200 GeV, using several shadowing parametrisations.

Mots clés: J/ψ production; heavy-ion collisions; cold nuclear matter effects

Domaines: Physique Nucléaire Expérimentale [nucl-ex]

A Rakotozafindrabe, E G Ferreiro, F Fleuret, J P Lansberg. On the theoretical and experimental uncertainties in the extraction of the J/psi absorption cross section in cold nuclear matter. International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM2009), Sep 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. pp.94055, ⟨10.1088/0954-3899/37/9/094055⟩. ⟨hal-00600861⟩