Excitation of color degrees of freedom of nuclear matter and J/ψ suppression

Abstract:

In high-energy nuclear collisions, the conventional Glauber model is commonly used to evaluate the contribution to J/ψ suppression originating from the inelastic interaction with colorless bound nucleons. This requires an effective value for the J/ψ-nucleon absorption cross-section which is larger than theoretically expected. On the other hand, multiple nucleon-nucleon collisions, mediated by color exchange interactions, excite their color degrees of freedom. We investigate the importance of this effect and find that these excited states provide a larger cross-section for J/ψ absorption. We conclude that the related corrections are important to explain the effective value extrapolated from experiment.