Cross section for charmonium absorption by nucleons

The cross section for J/psi absorption by nucleons is studied using a gauged SU(4) hadronic Lagrangian but with empirical particle masses, which has been used previously to study the cross sections for J/psi absorption by pion and rho meson. Including both two-body and three-body final states, we find that with a cutoff parameter of 1 GeV at interaction vertices involving charm hadrons, the J/psi-N absorption cross section is at most 5 mb and is consistent with that extracted from J/psi production from both photonuclear and proton-nucleus reactions.