Nuclear effects on J/{\psi} production in proton-nucleus collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates nuclear effects on J/ψ production in proton-nucleus collisions, emphasizing the importance of energy loss and nuclear absorption, and compares model predictions with experimental data to understand suppression mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of nuclear effects on J/ψ production using the Glauber model, highlighting the dominant role of energy loss at high xF and challenging previous assumptions about nuclear gluon distributions.

Findings

Energy loss significantly suppresses J/ψ production at high xF.

Nuclear gluon distribution anti-shadowing is inconsistent with HERA-B data.

J/ψ-nucleon inelastic cross section increases with xF.

Abstract

The study of nuclear effects for J/{\psi} production in proton-nucleus collisions is crucial for a correct interpretation of the J/{\psi} suppression patterns experimentally observed in heavy-ion collisions. By means of three representative sets of nuclear parton distribution, the energy loss effect in the initial state and the nuclear absorption effect in the final state are taken into account in the uniform framework of the Glauber model. A leading order phenomenological analysis is performed on J/{\psi} production cross-section ratios RW/Be(xF) for the E866 experimental data. The J/{\psi} suppression is investigated quantitatively due to the different nuclear effects. It is shown that the energy loss effect with resulting in the suppression on RW/Be(xF) is more important than the nuclear effects on parton distributions in high xF region. The E866 data in the small xF keep out the nuclear gluon distribution with a large anti-shadowing effect. However, the new HERA-B measurement is not in support of the anti-shadowing effect in the nuclear gluon distribution. It is found that the J/{\psi}-nucleon inelastic cross section {\sigma} J/{\psi} abs depends on the kinematical variable xF, and increases as xF in the region xF > 0.2. 1 Introduction