Nonlinear Behavior of Quarkonium Formation and Deconfinement Signals

Abstract

We anticipate new features of quarkonium production in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies which differ from a straightforward extrapolation of results at CERN SPS energy. General arguments indicate that one may expect quarkonium formation rates to increase more rapidly with energy and centrality than the production rate of the heavy quarks which they contain. This is due to new formation mechanisms in which independently-produced quarks and antiquarks form a bound quarkonium state. This mechanism will depend quadratically on the total number of initially-produced heavy quark pairs, and becomes numerically significant only at RHIC and LHC energy. When viewed as a signal of color deconfinement, a transition from suppression to enhancement may be observed. Explicit model calculations are presented, in which one can follow striking variations of final quarkonium production within a range of parameter space.