Centrality-dependent forward J/ψ production in high energy proton-nucleus collisions

Forward J/ψ production and suppression in high energy proton-nucleus collisions can be an important probe of gluon saturation. In an earlier work we studied this process in the Color Glass Condensate framework and showed that using the Glauber approach to extrapolate the dipole cross section of a proton to a nucleus leads to results closer to experimental data than previous calculations in this framework. In this work we discuss the relation between the explicit impact parameter dependence of the optical Glauber model and centrality and we compare our results with recent data on the centrality dependence of J/ψ suppression at the LHC presented by the ALICE Collaboration. We found here that this dependence appears to be much stronger than in recent ALICE data. Nevertheless, we stress that the results shown here have been obtained using a fixed impact parameter for which, in the optical Glauber model, the number of binary collisions corresponds to the average value of this quantity estimated by ALICE