Impact of parton energy loss and nPDFs on J/ψ production in proton-nucleus collisions

Abstract

The impact of parton energy loss and nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) on J/ψ production in proton-nucleus collisions are investigated by means of the E866, LHC and RHIC experimental data. By the recent EPPS21 nPDFs, a leading order phenomenological analysis of J/ψ production cross-section ratios is performed for E866 experimental data with considering the parton energy loss effect following Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) regime. The gluon transport coefficient qˆg extracted from the E866 data in 0.20<xF<0.65 region is qˆg=0.35±0.01 GeV2/fm with χ2/ndf=1.01, which indicates that the significantly better-constrained gluon distributions provided by EPPS21 contribute to accurately determining the gluon energy loss. It is founded that for E866 data in 0.20<xF<0.65 the depletion induced by cc¯ energy loss is the largest, gluon energy loss is the second, and quark energy loss is the smallest. In addition, it can be seen that for LHC and RHIC experiment the role of nPDFs and gluon energy loss on J/ψ production are both significant, which indicates that operating more precise measurements at LHC and RHIC in the future can facilitate significantly better-constrained gluon energy loss and nPDFs.