Toward an effective theory of quarkonium production nuclear matter
These proceedings are dedicated to Miklos Gyulassy's 70th birthday. In his long and distinguished career he has made seminal contributions to many areas of heavy ion theory, including early papers on quarkonium phenomenology in fixed-target heavy ion experiments. Theoretical and experimental studies of the J/ψ and Υ states have evolved considerably in the past decades, and I describe a recent generalization of non-relativistic Quantum Chromodynamics to include interactions in a generic nuclear medium. NRQCD with Glauber gluons aims to provide a universal microscopic description of the interaction of heavy quarkonia in a range of phases that include cold nuclear matter, dense hadron gas, and quark-gluon plasma. Such effective field theory is an important step toward understanding the common trends in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus data on quarkonium suppression.