Cross sections for J ψ,ψ′ and Drell-Yan production in Pb+Pb collisions at 158×A GeV/c are presented and compared with results obtained by the NA38 and NA51 collaborations. The Pb+Pb data have been collected by the NA50 collaboration using the NA38 dimuon spectrometer. The Drell-Yan mechanism is found to scale as (A projectile · B target ) in p+B target and A projectile + B target collisions including Pb+Pb collisions. Regarding J ψ , an anomalous suppression is observed in Pb+Pb collisions with respect to the suppression observed in p+B target , O+B target and S+U collisions. The cross section ratios ψ′ ( J ψ ) are similar in Pb+Pb and S+U collisions.
In this paper we present a study on the production of the J ψ and ψ′ resonances, decaying into muon pairs, in S-U collisions, at 200 GeV per incident nucleon. We find that the ratio between ψ′ and tJ ψ yields decreases as E T , the neutral transverse energy produced in the collision, increases. There is also a clear decrease of this ratio when going from p-W to S-U interactions. Assuming the high mass continuum to be Drell-Yan we discuss the possible understanding of the intermediate dimuon mass region as a superposition of Drell-Yan (extrapolated down in mass) and muon pairs from the semileptonic decays of charmed mesons. The p-W data is found to be explained by this procedure. However, the S-U data seems to be incompatible with a linear extrapolation from the proton-nucleus results.
The study of the J ψ transverse momentum distribution in oxygen-uranium reactions at 200 GeV/nucleon shows that 〈 P T 〉 and 〈 P T 2 〉 increase with the transverse energy of the reaction. Muon pairs in the mass continuum do not exhibit the same behaviour. The comparison of the J ψ production rates in central and peripheral collisions shows a significant diminution for low P T central events.
We present a new measurement of J/psi production in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 GeV/nucleon, from the data sample collected in year 2000 by the NA50 Collaboration, under improved experimental conditions with respect to previous years. With the target system placed in vacuum, the setup was better adapted to study, in particular, the most peripheral nuclear collisions with unprecedented accuracy. The analysis of this data sample shows that the (J/psi)/Drell-Yan cross-sections ratio measured in the most peripheral Pb-Pb interactions is in good agreement with the nuclear absorption pattern extrapolated from the studies of proton-nucleus collisions. Furthermore, this new measurement confirms our previous observation that the (J/psi)/Drell-Yan cross-sections ratio departs from the normal nuclear absorption pattern for semi-central Pb-Pb collisions and that this ratio persistently decreases up to the most central collisions.
Muon-pair production has been measured in pCu, pU, OCu, OU and SU collisions at 200 GeV per nucleon. The cross sections are compatible with the atomic number dependence ( A proj. A targ. ) α where α =0.91±0.04 for the J/ψ resonance and α =1.01±0.04 for muon pairs produced in the mass continuum between 1.7 and 2.7 GeV/ c 2 .
The analysis of the data collected by the NA50 experiment in 1998, reported in this paper, extends and clarifies the pattern of the previously observed J/ ψ anomalous suppression. This new measurement, besides providing a deeper understanding of the previous observations, reveals a steady significative decrease in the J/ ψ production rate up to the most central Pb-Pb collisions. It clearly rules out the presently available conventional (hadronic) models of J/ ψ suppression, which unanimously predict a saturation of the J/ ψ rate for central Pb-Pb collisions. On the contrary and together with the sharp onset of the anomalous suppression previously reported, the new observation leads to a global production rate pattern which finds its natural explanation in the framework of the formation of a deconfined state of quarks and gluons.
We have studied the production of J/ ψ , ψ ′ and prompt muon pairs in the mass continuum from a sample of sulfur-uranium interactions at 200 GeV/c per nucleon. We report, in this letter, results obtained for the transverse momentum distributions and their dependence on the transverse energy released in the collision, used as an estimator of the centrality of the nucleus-nucleus interaction.
The dimuon production in 200 GeV/nucleon O-U, O-Cu, S-U and p-U reactions is studied in function of transverse energy E T produced by the collision. The J / ψ production relative to continuum events is suppressed for heavy ion induced reactions when E T increases. This suppression is enhanced at low transverse momentum. The π and K meson distributions extracted from the data, have, for each reaction, a similar average transverse momentum which increases only slightly with the transverse energy.
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First results on charm quarkonia production in heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are presented. The yield of J/Psi's measured in the PHENIX experiment via electron-positron decay pairs at mid-rapidity for Au-Au reactions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV are analyzed as a function of collision centrality. For this analysis we have studied 49.3 million minimum bias Au-Au reactions. We present the J/Psi invariant yield dN/dy for peripheral and mid-central reactions. For the most central collisions where we observe no signal above background, we quote 90% confidence level upper limits. We compare these results with our J/Psi measurement from proton-proton reactions at the same energy. We find that our measurements are not consistent with models that predict strong enhancement relative to binary collision scaling.