Color Deconfinement and Charmonium Production in Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

In statistical QCD, color deconfinement and the properties of the quark-gluon plasma determine the in-medium behavior of heavy quark bound states. In high energy nuclear collisions, charmonia probe the partonic medium produced in the early stages of the interaction. We survey the present theoretical status and provide a critical evaluation of the charmonium production measurements in experiments at the CERN-SPS and the BNL-RHIC.

Comments: 62 pages, 86 figures