The ALICE experiment has measured quarkonia production in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at the CERN LHC, in the rapidity ranges |y|<0.9 and 2.5<y<4. Quarkonia are considered to be a sensitive probe of deconfinement, and a detailed differential study of the
ir yields can give important information on the properties of the medium created in heavy-ion collisions. In this paper, we will mainly discuss the centrality dependence of the J/psi nuclear modification factors, as well as their p_T and y dependence in bins of centrality, which will be then compared to theoretical models. Preliminary results on the J/psi elliptic flow and on psi(2S) production will also be shown.
The ALICE Collaboration has measured inclusive J/psi production in pp collisions at a center of mass energy sqrt(s)=2.76 TeV at the LHC. The results presented in this Letter refer to the rapidity ranges |y|<0.9 and 2.5<y<4 and have been obtained by m
easuring the electron and muon pair decay channels, respectively. The integrated luminosities for the two channels are L^e_int=1.1 nb^-1 and L^mu_int=19.9 nb^-1, and the corresponding signal statistics are N_J/psi^e+e-=59 +/- 14 and N_J/psi^mu+mu-=1364 +/- 53. We present dsigma_J/psi/dy for the two rapidity regions under study and, for the forward-y range, d^2sigma_J/psi/dydp_t in the transverse momentum domain 0<p_t<8 GeV/c. The results are compared with previously published results at sqrt(s)=7 TeV and with theoretical calculations.
The NA60 experiment has studied J/psi production in p-A collisions at 158 and 400 GeV, at the CERN SPS. Nuclear effects on the J/psi yield have been estimated from the A-dependence of the production cross section ratios sigma_{J/psi}^{A}/sigma_{J/psi
}^{Be} (A=Al, Cu, In, W, Pb, U). We observe a significant nuclear suppression of the J/psi yield per nucleon-nucleon collision, with a larger effect at lower incident energy, and we compare this result with previous observations by other fixed-target experiments. An attempt to disentangle the different contributions to the observed suppression has been carried out by studying the dependence of nuclear effects on x_2, the fraction of nucleon momentum carried by the interacting parton in the target nucleus.
The NA60 experiment studies muon pair production at the CERN SPS. In this letter we report on a precision measurement of J/psi in In-In collisions. We have studied the J/psi centrality distribution, and we have compared it with the one expected if ab
sorption in cold nuclear matter were the only active suppression mechanism. For collisions involving more than ~80 participant nucleons, we find that an extra suppression is present. This result is in qualitative agreement with previous Pb-Pb measurements by the NA50 experiment, but no theoretical explanation is presently able to coherently describe both results.
