Measurement of the centrality dependence of J/ψ yields and observation of Z production in lead–lead collisions with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Using the ATLAS detector, a centrality-dependent suppression has been observed in the yield of J/ψ mesons produced in the collisions of lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider. In a sample of minimum-bias lead–lead collisions at a nucleon–nucleon centre of mass energy sNN=2.76 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 6.7 μb−1, J/ψ mesons are reconstructed via their decays to μ+μ− pairs. The measured J/ψ yield, normalized to the …