Heavy flavor kinetics at the hadronization transition

Abstract

We investigate the in-medium modification of the charmonium breakup processes due to the Mott effect for light (pi, rho) and open-charm (D, D*) quark-antiquark bound states at the chiral/deconfinement phase transition. The Mott effect for the D-mesons effectively reduces the threshold for charmonium breakup cross sections, which is suggested as an explanation of the anomalous J/psi suppression phenomenon in the NA50 experiment. Further implications of finite-temperature mesonic correlations for the hadronization of heavy flavors in heavy-ion collisions are discussed.