Unified description of charmonium suppression in a quark-gluon plasma medium at RHIC and LHC energies

Abstract

Recent experimental and theoretical studies suggest that the quarkonium suppression in a thermal QCD medium created in heavy ion collisions is a complex interplay of various physical processes. In this article we put together most of these processes in a unified way to calculate the charmonium survival probability (nuclear modification factor) at energies available at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. We include shadowing as the dominant cold-nuclear-matter effect. Further, gluonic dissociation and collision damping are included, which provide width to the spectral function of charmonia in a thermal medium and cause the dissociation of charmonium along with the usual color screening. We include color screening by using our recently proposed modified Chu–Matsui model. Furthermore, we incorporate the recombination of uncorrelated charm and anticharm quarks for the regeneration of charmonium over the entire temporal evolution of the QGP medium. Finally, we do a feed-down correction from the excited states to calculate the survival probability of charmonium. We find that our unified model suitably and simultaneously describes the experimental nuclear modification data of J/ψ at RHIC and LHC.