Coherence time effects on J/ψ production and suppression in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Using a coherence time extracted from high precision proton-nucleus Drell-Yan measurements and a nuclear absorption cross section extracted from pA charmonium production experiments, we study J/ψ production and absorption in nucleus-nucleus collisions. We find that coherence time effects are large enough to affect the measured J/ψ-to-Drell-Yan ratio. The S+U data at 200A GeV/c measured by NA38 are reproduced quantitatively without the introduction of any new parameters. However, when compared with recent NA50 measurements for Pb+Pb at 158A GeV/c, the data is not reproduced in trend or in magnitude.