2–6 Aug 2021
online
Europe/Brussels timezone

NRQCD vs. LHC quarkonium production: signs of a deeper J/psi polarization puzzle?

6 Aug 2021, 15:40
20m
online

online

Parallel contribution C: Heavy quarks Parallels Track C

Speaker

Pietro Faccioli (LIP Lisbon)

Description

A purely data-driven fit of J/psi, psi(2S) and chi_c1,2 measurements reported by ATLAS and CMS, including the recently measured chi_c decay distributions, constrains the polarization of the directly produced J/psi mesons to a remarkably small and pT-independent value: lambda_theta = 0.04 +- 0.06. If this observation of seemingly unpolarized quarkonium production is confirmed by more precise polarization measurements, we may be be seeing a significant violation of the non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD) velocity scaling rules, which determine the magnitudes of the colour octet contributions. Can the NRQCD factorization expansion be made compatible with such an observation? Whatever the answer, high-precision polarization measurements will improve our fundamental understanding of quarkonium production.

Primary authors

Presentation materials