Survival of charmonia in a hot environment

Understand

A colorless c-cbar dipole emerging from a heavy ion collision and developing the charmonium wave function can be broken-up by final state interactions (FSI) propagating through the hot medium created in the collision.

• We single out two mechanisms of charmonium attenuation: (i) Debye color screening, called melting; and (ii) color-exchange interaction with the medium, called absorption.
• The former problem has been treated so far only for charmonia at rest embedded in the medium, while in practice their transverse momenta at the LHC are quite high, <p_T^2>=7-10 GeV^2.
• We demonstrate that a c-cbar dipole may have a large survival probability even at infinitely high temperature.