Charmonium in medium: From correlators to experiment

We set up a framework in which in-medium charmonium properties are constrained by thermal lattice quantum chromodynamics and subsequently implemented into a thermal rate equation enabling the comparison with experimental data in heavy-ion collisions. Specifically, we evaluate phenomenological consequences for charmonium production originating from two different scenarios in which either the free or the internal energy are identified with the in-medium two-body potential between charm and anticharm quarks. These two scenarios represent J/ ``melting temperatures'' of approximately 1. 25T₂ (``weak binding'') and 2T₂ (``strong binding''), respectively. Within current uncertainties in dissociation rates and charm-quark momentum spectra, both scenarios can reproduce the centrality dependence of inclusive J/ yields in nuclear collisions at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) reasonably well. However, the ``strong-binding'' scenario associated with the internal energy as the potential tends to better reproduce current data on transverse momentum spectra at both SPS and RHIC.