Charmonium in medium: From correlators to experiment

Abstract

We set up a framework in which in-medium charmonium properties are constrained by thermal lattice quantum chromodynamics 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 two-body potential between charm and anticharm quarks. These two scenarios represent $J/\ensuremath{\psi}$ ``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 $J/\ensuremath{\psi}$ yields in nuclear collisions at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) reasonably well. However, the ``strong-binding'' scenario associated with the internal energy as the potential tends to better reproduce current data on transverse momentum spectra at both SPS and RHIC.