The energy loss effect of incoming gluon from $J/\psi$ production in p-A collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the energy loss of incoming gluons in proton-nucleus collisions affecting J/ψ production, quantifies the energy loss rate, and compares it across different energies, highlighting its significance in nuclear suppression phenomena.

Contribution

It provides the first quantitative extraction of gluon energy loss per unit length from experimental data and demonstrates its impact on J/ψ suppression across a wide energy range.

Findings

Gluon energy loss per unit length is approximately 2.18 GeV/fm.

Gluons lose more energy than incident quarks in these collisions.

Gluon energy loss significantly contributes to J/ψ suppression from fixed-target to collider energies.

Abstract

The energy loss effect of incoming gluon from $J/\psi$ production in p-A (or d-A) collisions is investigated by means of the E866, RHIC and LHC experimental data. The gluon mean energy loss per unit path length $dE/dL = 2.18\pm0.14$ GeV/fm is extracted by fitting the E866 experimental data for $J/\psi$ production cross section ratios $R_{W(Fe)/Be}(x_{F})$. The obtained result indicates that the incoming gluons lose more energy than the incident quarks. By comparing the theoretical results with E866, RHIC, and LHC experimental data, it is found that the nuclear suppression due to the incident gluon (quark) energy loss reduces (increases) with the increase of the kinematic variable $x_{F}$ (or $y$). The energy loss effect of incoming gluon plays an important role on the suppression of $J/\psi$ production in a wide energy range from $\sqrt{s}=38.7$ GeV to $\sqrt{s}=5.0$ TeV, and the influence of incident quark energy loss can be ignored for high energy(such as at RHIC and LHC energy).