  We demonstrate that it is possible to use the polarization of vector
quarkonia, measured from dilepton event samples, as an instrument to study the
suppression of chi_c and chi_b in heavy-ion collisions, where a direct
determination of signal yields involving the identification of low-energy
photons is essentially impossible. A change of the observed J/psi and
Upsilon(1S) polarizations from proton-proton to central nucleus-nucleus
collisions would directly reflect differences in the nuclear dissociation
patterns of S and P states and may provide a strong indication for quarkonium
sequential suppression in the quark-gluon plasma.
