Charmonium Production with Statistical Hadronization at the RHIC

We present the results of charmonium production at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) energies by using a hybrid model that directly creates cc̄ pairs in early-stage hard scatterings and hadronizes open and hidden charm particles according to the statistical law at chemical freeze-out of the deconfined quark-gluon plasma. The effect of possible normal nuclear absorption due to the dissociation of charmonia in the expanding hadronic fireball is also investigated. We find that about two-thirds of the total J/ψ′s can be dissociated in the most central Au + Au collisions because of this absorption. The resultant J/ψ yields are compared with the upper limits and most likely values recently published by the PHENIX collaboration.