Quarkonium tomography of heavy ion collisions at the LHC

Abstract

Quarkonium production in high-energy hadronic collisions provides a fundamental test of QCD. Its modification in a nuclear medium is a sensitive probe of the space-time temperature profile and transport properties of the QGP, yielding constraints complementary to the ones obtained from the quenching of light hadrons and jets, and open heavy flavor. In these proceedings, we report new results for the suppression of high transverse momentum charmonium [$J/ψ,\, ψ(2S)$] and bottomonium [$Υ(1S),\, Υ(2S),\, Υ(3S)$] states in Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Our theoretical formalism combines the collisional dissociation of quarkonia, as they propagate in the quark-gluon plasma, with the thermal wavefunction effects due to the screening of the $Q\bar{Q}$ attractive potential in the medium. We find that a good description of the relative suppression of the ground and higher excited quarkonium states, transverse momentum and centrality distributions is achieved, when comparison to measurements at a center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV is performed. Theoretical predictions for the highest Pb+Pb center-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV at the LHC, where new experimental results are being finalized are presented. Preliminary calculations for smaller systems, such as Xe+Xe are also shown. Last but not least, the potential of jet substructure to shed light in the mechanisms of heavy flavor production is discussed.