Chiral Symmetry Restoration and Anomalous J/ψ Suppression

We investigate the in-medium modification of pseudoscalar and vector mesons within a QCD motivated chiral quark model by solving the Dyson-Schwinger equations for quarks and mesons at finite temperature in the wide mass range from light mesons (π, σ ρ) to open-charm mesons (D, D*). At the chiral/deconfinement phase transition, the quark-antiquark bound states enter the continuum of unbound states and become broad resonances (Mott effect). We calculate the in-medium cross section for charmonium breakup processes due to light hadron impact within a chiral Lagrangian approach and show that the Mott effect for the D-mesons effectively reduces the threshold for charmonium breakup and leads to a step-like behaviour of the reaction rate. This is suggested as an explanation of the anomalous J/ψ suppression phenomenon in the NA50 experiment.