Color Screening and the Suppression of the Charmonium State Yield in Nuclear Reactions

We discuss the new data for the production of the $\psi'$ meson in pA collisions at 450 GeV at CERN-SPS (of the NA50-collaboration) [1]. We extract from the CERN data $\sigma(\psi' N)\approx 8$ mb under the assumption that the $\psi'$ is produced as a result of the space-time evolution of a point-like $c\bar c$ pair which expands with time to the full size of the charmonium state. In the analysis we assume the existence of a relationship between the distribution of color in a hadron and the cross section of its interaction with a nucleon. However, our result is rather sensitive to the pattern of the expansion of the wave packet and significantly larger values of $\sigma(\psi' N)$ are not ruled out by the data. We show that recent CERN data confirm the suggestion of [2] that color fluctuations of the strengths in charmonium-nucleon interaction are the major source of suppression of the $J/\psi$ yield as observed at CERN in both pA and AA collisions.