Recent heavy flavour and quarkonia measurements by the PHENIX experiment

The discovery at the RHIC of large high-p(T) suppression and flow of electrons from heavy quarks has altered our view of the hot and dense matter formed in central Au+Au collisions at root s(NN) = 200 GeV. Meanwhile, the nuclear modification of the J/psi yield has shown weak energy density dependence when comparing measurements at CERN-SPS and at RHIC energies and measurements in different rapidities. PHENIX has carried out a comprehensive study of heavy quarks including a baseline measurement of heavy flavour, J/psi and gamma in p+p collisions, and the fractional contribution to J/psi from psi' and chi(c) decays. The initial state and other cold nuclear matter effectswere studied using a large data set collected in d+Au collisions. A modest nuclear modification factor of electrons from heavy flavour decays at mid-rapidity was observed in d+Au and in Cu+Cu collisions. We found a significant suppression of J/psi in d+Au for all rapidity ranges covered by PHENIX. This suppression is stronger at forward rapidity than at mid-rapidity and the dependence with the nuclear thickness is not linear. A similar suppression trend was also observed for gamma (1S+2S+3S) but with large statistical uncertainties. A more precise measurement of the J/psi yield in Au+Au collisions in the forward rapidity is consistent with our previous observation. The centrality dependence of the J/psi suppression also shows similar behaviour when looking at the data collected in Au+Au collisions at root s(NN) = 62 GeV and root s(NN) = 39 GeV, supporting previous comparisons with CERN-SPS data.