The study of gluon energy loss in cold nuclear matter from J/ψ production**Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (11405043) and Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (A2018209269)

Abstract

The energy loss effects of the incident quark, gluon, and the color octet on J/ψ suppression in p-A collisions are studied by means of the experimental data at E866, RHIC, and LHC energy. We extracted the transport coefficient for gluon energy loss from the E866 experimental data in the middle xF region (0.20 < xF > 0.65) based on the Salgado-Wiedemann (SW) quenching weights and the recent EPPS16 nuclear parton distribution functions together with nCTEQ15. It was determined that the difference between the values of the transport coefficient for light quark, gluon, and heavy quark in cold nuclear matter is very small. The theoretical results modified by the parton energy loss effects are consistent with the experimental data for E866 and RHIC energy, and the gluon energy loss plays a remarkable role on J/ψ suppression in a broad variable range. Because the corrections of the nuclear parton distribution functions in the J/ψ channel are significant at LHC energy level, the nuclear modification due to the parton energy loss is minimal. It is worth noting that we use the color evaporation model (CEM) at leading order to compute the p-p baseline, and the conclusion in this paper is CEM model dependent.