$J/\psi$ production and suppression in high energy proton-nucleus collisions

Abstract

We apply a Color Glass Condensate+Non-Relativistic QCD (CGC+NRQCD) framework to compute $J/\psi$ production in deuteron-nucleus collisions at RHIC and proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC. Our results match smoothly at high $p_\perp$ to a next-to-leading order perturbative QCD + NRQCD computation. Excellent agreement is obtained for $p_\perp$ spectra at RHIC and LHC for central and forward rapidities, as well as for the normalized ratio $R_{pA}$ of these results to spectra in proton-proton collisions. In particular, we observe that the $R_{pA}$ data is strongly bounded by our computations of the same for each of the individual NRQCD channels; this result provides strong evidence that our description is robust against uncertainties in initial conditions and hadronization mechanisms.