Charmonium in medium: From correlators to experiment

Abstract

We set up a framework in which in-medium charmonium properties are constrained by thermal lattice quantum chromodynamics and subsequently implemented into a thermal rate equation enabling the comparison with experimental data in heavy-ion collisions. Specifically, we evaluate phenomenological consequences for charmonium production originating from two different scenarios in which either the free or the internal energy are identified with the in-medium two-body potential between charm and anticharm quarks. These two scenarios represent J/psi " melting temperatures" of approximately 1.25T(c) ("weak binding") and 2T(c) (" strong binding"), respectively. Within current uncertainties in dissociation rates and charm-quark momentum spectra, both scenarios can reproduce the centrality dependence of inclusive J/psi yields in nuclear collisions at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) reasonably well. However, the "strong-binding" scenario associated with the internal energy as the potential tends to better reproduce current data on transverse momentum spectra at both SPS and RHIC.