On the theoretical and experimental uncertainties in the extraction of the J/ψ absorption cross section in cold nuclear matter

We investigate the cold nuclear matter effects on J/ψ production, whose understanding is fundamental to studying the quark-gluon plasma. Two of these effects are of particular relevance: the shadowing of the parton distributions and the nuclear absorption of the c̄ pair. If J/ψ's are not produced via a 2 → 1 process as suggested by recent theoretical works, one has to modify accordingly the way of computing the nuclear shadowing. This naturally induces differences in the absorption cross-section fit to the data. A careful analysis of these differences, however, requires taking into account the experimental uncertainties and their correlations, as done in this work for dAu collisions at √_sNN = 200 GeV, using several shadowing parametrizations.