1997/02/18 by B. Z. Kopeliovich, Kopeliovich, B. Z.
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Nuclear Physics and Applications #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/9702365
openalex publication_date 1997/02/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Nuclear suppression of charmonium production in proton-nucleus interactions is poorly understood, what restrains our attempts to single out unusual effects in heavy ion collisions. We develop a phenomenological approach, based on the light-cone dynamics of charmonium production, which has much in common with deep-inelastic scattering and Drell-Yan lepton pair production. The key observation is the existence of a soft mechanism of heavy flavour production, which scales in the quark mass and dominates shadowing corrections and diffraction. It naturally explains the surprisingly strong nuclear suppression of J/Psi at large Feynman-xF. The low-xF region is subject to a complicated interplay of hard and soft mechanisms. With evaluated parameters we nicely describe available data on charmonium production in proton-nucleus collisions. Using these results we predict a new process, diffractive production of charmonium on a nucleon target, which fraction in the total production rate of charmonium is evaluated at 12%.