Münster 2002 – scientific programme
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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 27: Heavy Ions III
HK 27.2: Group Report
Wednesday, March 13, 2002, 11:15–11:45, E
Charmonium Evolution in a Hot and Dense Environment — •Alberto Polleri1, Thorsten Renk1, Roland A. Schneider1, and Wolfram Weise1,2 — 1Physik Department, TU München, D-85747 Garching,Germany — 2ECT*, I-38050 Villazzano (TN), Italy
It has been suggested long ago that the measurement of the J/ψ production cross section in ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions can provide an important signal of quark-gluon deconfinement. Intense theoretical work has been performed in order to understand the production process in proton-nucleus collisions. This piece of information is used to provide a baseline to the study of the subsequent evolution of J/ψ and, more generally, of charmonia, in the hot and dense medium produced in more complex high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. With this input, we study the subsequent interactions of charmonia as they collide with the constituents of the produced fireball. The latter evolves in a manner controlled by the equation of state as given by lattice QCD, and is constructed in such a way that the observed hadronic spectra are correctly reproduced. A kinetic description of charmonium interactions with both quark-gluon and hadronic degrees of freedom allows to study in microscopic detail the evolution in different regimes, controlled by collision energy, kinematics (rapidity and pT) and geometry (centrality). While the amount of data collected at the CERN-SPS accelerator is well described, new predictions for the presently running BNL-RHIC machine are presented.
[*] Work supported in part by BMBF and GSI.