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Title: [ital J]/[psi] suppression in hadron-nucleus collisions

Journal Article · · Physical Review, C (Nuclear Physics); (United States)
; ;  [1]
  1. Bonner Nuclear Laboratory, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77251 (United States) Theoretical Division, MSB283, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545 (United States) Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011 (United States) Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Heidelberg, Philosophenweg 19, D-69120 Heidelberg (Germany)

We examine the production of [ital J]/[psi] mesons in high energy hadron-nucleus collisions using models that account for both the initial state modification of parton distributions in nuclei and the final state interaction of the produced [ital c[bar c]] pairs. We show that, at the energies of current fixed target experiments, [ital J]/[psi] production through quark-antiquark annihilation gives the largest contribution at [ital x][sub [ital F]][gt]0.5 while gluon-gluon fusion dominates the production at smaller [ital x][sub [ital F]]. The observed [ital J]/[psi] suppression at large [ital x][sub [ital F]] is directly connected to nuclear shadowing in deeply inelastic scattering. We find that a 6--8 mb [ital c[bar c]]-nucleon cross section is needed to explain the data on [ital J]/[psi] suppression if a simple incoherent multiple scattering formalism is used for the final state interactions. We then provide a more complete model to incorporate the effects of final state multiple soft scatterings. With only one parameter, this model can fit both the normalization and [ital A] dependence of the data for a variety of nuclei.

DOE Contract Number:
FG02-87ER40371; FG02-92ER40730
OSTI ID:
7263722
Journal Information:
Physical Review, C (Nuclear Physics); (United States), Vol. 50:2; ISSN 0556-2813
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English