Exclusive heavy vector meson photoproduction on nuclei in NLO perturbative QCD
Abstract
We make predictions for the cross section of coherent photoproduction in Pb-Pb and O-O ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) at the LHC as a function of the rapidity in the framework of collinear factorization and next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD. We quantify the strong scale dependence and significant uncertainties due to nuclear PDFs and show that our approach provides a reasonable description of the LHC data on coherent photoproduction in Pb-Pb UPCs. We demonstrate that these uncertainties are reduced by approximately a factor of 10 in the scaled ratio of the O-O and Pb-Pb UPC cross sections. Our analysis indicates the dominance of the quark contribution to the UPC cross section at central rapidities, which affects the interpretation of the UPC data.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2303.12630,
title = {Exclusive heavy vector meson photoproduction on nuclei in NLO perturbative QCD},
author = {K. J. Eskola and V. Guzey and T. Löytäinen and H. Paukkunen and C. A. Flett},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.12630},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
10 pages, 6 figures. Contribution to Proceedings of XXIX Cracow EPIPHANY Conference on Physics at the Electron-Ion Collider and Future Facilities, Cracow, Poland, January 16-19, 2023