THE J/PSI ABSORPTION CROSS-SECTION IN NUCLEI AND COLOR SCREENING

Data on 120 GeV photoproduction of J/PSI's in nuclear targets are re-examined to extract the absorption cross section for J/PSI's in high energy collisions with nucleons. We find sigma(a) = 6.6 +/- 2.2 mb in contrast with an earlier estimate of 1-2 mb. Comparison of low and high energy data on photon produced J/PSI's thus no longer show possible evidence for observable effects of color screening. Examination of representative data on the Feynman x distributions of J/PSI production by hadrons demonstrates how to extract both the total inelastic J/PSI-nucleon cross section and the partial cross section into open charm. We find that the data is inconsistent with any significant contribution from color screening.