Charmonium in Medium: From Correlators to Experiment

Understand

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.