Charmonium Transport in Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC

Abstract

We provide an update on our semi-classical transport approach for quarkonium production in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, focusing on J/ψ and ψ(2S) mesons in 5.02 TeV Pb-Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at both forward and mid-rapidity. In particular, we employ the most recent charm-production cross sections reported in pp collisions, which are pivotal for the magnitude of the regeneration contribution, and their modifications due to cold-nuclear-matter (CNM) effects. Multi-differential observables are calculated in terms of nuclear modification factors as a function of centrality, transverse momentum, and rapidity, including the contributions from feeddown from bottom hadron decays. For our predictions for ψ(2S) production, the mechanism of sequential regeneration relative to the more strongly bound J/ψ meson plays an important role in interpreting recent ALICE data.

Keywords

• quark–gluon plasma
• charmonia
• ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions