Calibrating the In-Medium Behavior of Quarkonia

Abstract

Quarkonium production has been considered as a tool to study the medium formed in high-energy nuclear collisions, assuming that the formation of a hot and dense environment modifies the production pattern observed in elementary collisions. The basic features measured there are the relative fractions of hidden to open heavy flavor and the relative fractions of the different hidden heavy flavor states. Hence the essential question is if and how these quantities are modified in nuclear collisions. We show how the relevant data must be calibrated; that is, what reference has to be used, in order to determine this in a model-independent way.