Charmonium in Medium: From Correlators to Experiment

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework linking lattice QCD constraints to charmonium production in heavy-ion collisions, comparing two potential scenarios and their ability to reproduce experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate in-medium charmonium properties from lattice QCD into a thermal rate equation for experimental comparison.

Findings

Both potential scenarios can fit the centrality dependence of J/ψ yields.

The strong-binding scenario better reproduces transverse momentum spectra.

Charmonium melting temperatures differ significantly between scenarios.

Abstract

We set up a framework in which in-medium charmonium properties are constrained by thermal lattice QCD 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 2-body potential between charm and anti-charm quarks. These two scenarios represent $J/\psi$ "melting temperatures" of approximately 1.25\,$T_c$ ("weak binding") and 2\,$T_c$ ("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 SPS and RHIC reasonably well. However, the "strong-binding" scenario associated the the internal energy as the potential tends to better reproduce current data on transverse momentum spectra at both SPS and RHIC.