Charmonium dissociation in hadronic matter

Abstract

Production of J/$ψ$ from nucleus-nucleus reactions depends sensitively on the dissociation cross section with light hadrons. Effective lagrangian methods are used to describe the hadronic degrees of freedom, including strangeness and charm. Cross sections with pions, rho mesons, kaons and nucleons having magnitudes 4--8 mb are found, and with steep thresholds. This, folded with thermal momentum distributions for the scattering partners, suggests a mean dissociation lifetime $\simeq$ 20 fm/c. Therefore, the ``abnormal'' J/$ψ$ suppression seen in recent Pb+Pb experiments seems to owe to expected hadron kinetics.