Darmstadt 2008 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 33: Hauptvorträge

HK 33.3: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 13, 2008, 12:00–12:30, 1A

Charmonium and the Quark-Gluon Plasma: from now to the LHC — •Anton Andronic — GSI, Planckstr. 1

Charmonium production is considered, since the original proposal more than 20 years ago about its suppression in a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) [1], a crucial probe to determine the degree of deconfinement reached in ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions. With a colliding energy for Pb beams more than 25 times larger than the energy of present studies performed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will probe the QGP in a totally new domain. After more than 10 years of sustained effort, the construction of the dedicated ALICE detector is approaching completion. It will be ideally suited to meet the experimental challenges at the LHC, in particular for charmonium measurements. The present status of charmonium physics and the perspectives in the era of the LHC are reviewed. Emphasis is placed on the understanding of charmonium within the statistical hadronization model for charmed hadrons [2], which was recently shown [3] to achieve a consistent description of the available experimental data. This model predicts qualitatively new features of charmonium production at the LHC which await confrontation with data in the coming years.