Sizing up the Nuclear Glue in $J/ψ$-production

Abstract

Nuclear gluon densities are of great importance to the physics of relativistic heavy ion collisions, in particular, in assessing the origin of $J/ψ$-suppression. We describe our attempts to distinguish various models of the gluonic EMC-effect, using the existing $J/ψ$-production data in proton-nucleus collisions. We find that no model is capable of explaining {\em all} the features of the high precision E772 data although the overall trend suggests this to be more a matter of fine-tuning the models than the presence of new physical effects.