Mott mechanism and anomalous charmonium suppression

Abstract

We investigate a scenario where conditions for Mott dissociation of charmonium are fulfilled locally in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at the short time scales before hadronization and study possible consequences to be drawn from observation of ``anomalous'' thresholds in the J/\psi suppression pattern. We suggest that for a compilation of experiments with different kinematics, variables presently in use to display the observed suppression pattern should be rescaled by the $\gamma$ factor of the $c\bar c$ state relative to the participant center of mass. This systematics can be tested by inverse kinematics experiments as, e.g., Pb-S collisions and by sampling data sets in p_T and y of the dimuon pairs.