J/ψ production and suppression in high-energy proton-nucleus collisions

We apply a color glass condensate + nonrelativistic QCD (CGC + NRQCD) framework to compute J/psi production in deuteron-nucleus collisions at RHIC and proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC. Our results match smoothly at high p(perpendicular to) to a next-to-leading order perturbative QCD + NRQCD computation. Excellent agreement is obtained for p(perpendicular to) spectra at the RHIC and LHC for central and forward rapidities, as well as for the normalized ratio R-pA of these results to spectra in proton-proton collisions. In particular, we observe that the R-pA data are strongly bounded by our computations of the same for each of the individual NRQCD channels; this result provides strong evidence that our description is robust against uncertainties in initial conditions and hadronization mechanisms.