Charmonium dissociation cross sections and charmonium dissociation rates in hadronic matter

Abstract

K*-charmonium dissociation reactions in hadronic matter are studied in the Born approximation, in the quark-interchange mechanism, and with a temperature-dependent quark potential. We obtain the temperature dependence of unpolarized cross sections for K*-charmonium dissociation reactions which produce charmed mesons and charmed strange mesons. We use the cross sections for charmonium dissociation in collisions with pion, rho meson, kaon, vector kaon, and eta meson to calculate dissociation rates of charmonium with the five types of mesons. Because of the temperature dependence of the meson masses, dissociation cross sections, and meson distribution functions, the charmonium dissociation rates generally increase with the increase of temperature and decrease with the increase of charmonium momentum from 2.2 GeV/c. We find that the first derivative of the dissociation rate with respect to the charmonium momentum is zero when the charmonium is at rest. While the eta + psi' and eta + chi_c dissociation reactions can be neglected, the J/psi, psi', and chi_c dissociation are caused by the collisions with pion, rho meson, kaon, vector kaon, and eta meson.