Abstract
We suggest the variation of charmonium production rate with Feynman in heavy ion collisions as a novel and sensitive probe for the properties of the created matter. Final state interactions with the comoving matter create a minimum at , which is especially deep and narrow if a quark-gluon plasma is formed. While a strong effect is predicted at SPS, at the RHIC energy it overlaps with the expected peak formed by shadowing effects and needs comparison with pA data. We predict a steep dependence on centrality and suggest that this new probe is complementary to the dependence on transverse energy, and is more sensitive to a scenario of final state interactions.
- Received 27 April 2001
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.112302
©2001 American Physical Society