Complete calculation of exclusive heavy vector meson production at next-to-leading order in the dipole picture

Abstract

Exclusive production of transversely polarized heavy vector mesons in deep inelastic scattering at high energy is calculated at next-to-leading order accuracy in the Color Glass Condensate framework. In addition to the first QCD correction proportional to the strong coupling constant αs, we systematically also include the first relativistic correction proportional to the heavy quark velocity squared v2. When combined with our previously published results for longitudinal vector meson production at next-to-leading order accuracy, these results make phenomenological calculations of heavy vector meson production possible at the order $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (αsv0,$$ {\alpha}_{\mathrm{s}}^0 $$ α s 0 v2). When applied to J/ψ and Υ production at HERA and at the LHC, a good agreement between the next-to-leading order calculations and experimental data is found. Additionally, we demonstrate that vector meson production can provide additional constraints compared to structure function analyses when the nonperturbative initial condition for the Balitsky-Kovchegov evolution equation is extracted.

Proton structure functions at NLO in the dipole picture with massive quarks

“…The results also demonstrate that the inclusion of the heavy quark production data to the extraction of the non-perturbative initial condition for the high-energy evolution equation provides additional tight constraints. Similar conclusions have also been made in calculations of exclusive heavy quarkonium production [41,42]. The charm and vector meson production data can provide such constraints, as they are sensitive to much smaller dipoles than inclusive structure functions (see e.g.…”

“…Refs. [41,42,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. In the future, we plan to perform a full Bayesian analysis to determine the likelihood distribution for all the model parameters, which will enable one to also fully take into account the propagation of model uncertainties.…”

Back-to-back inclusive dijets in DIS at small x: Sudakov suppression and gluon saturation at NLO

“…Further, the expression for the impact factor is process-dependent in contrast to the evolution of the color correlators which should be universal. This rapidity factorization [42] has been shown for a number of processes at the stated leading logarithmic accuracy [43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]. Thus far it has been demonstrated explicitly to hold at next-to-leading-logarithmic accuracy in x only for the fully inclusive DIS cross-section [42,57].…”

The QCD shockwave approach at NLO: towards precision physics in gluonic saturation

“…For inclusive processes, this list contains inclusive DIS [32][33][34], inclusive photoproduction of dijets [35,36], photon-dijet production in DIS [37], dijets in DIS [38,39], single hadron [40] and dihadrons production in DIS [41,42]. For diffractive processes, NLO impact factors are known for exclusive dijets [43][44][45] and exclusive light meson production [46,47], exclusive quarkonium production [48,49], and inclusive diffractive DIS [50]. Recently, the impact factor for diffractive production of a pair of hadrons at large p T , in γ ( * ) nucleon/nucleus scattering was obtained, in the most general kinematics [51].…”