Associated Production of Heavy Quarkonia and Electroweak Bosons at Present and Future Colliders
Bernd A. Kniehl, Caesar P. Palisoc, Lennart Zwirner
TL;DR
This work formulates and computes the leading-order NRQCD predictions for the associated production of heavy quarkonia with electroweak bosons (γ, Z, W, H) across photon-photon, photon-hadron, and hadron-hadron collisions. By providing analytic LO partonic cross sections and a unified master framework that integrates photon fluxes, PDFs, and NRQCD long-distance matrix elements, it isolates color-octet (CO) and color-singlet (CS) contributions for J/ψ and χcJ states. Numerical results across TESLA, THERA, Tevatron, and LHC illustrate when CO processes dominate and highlight observables that could test NRQCD factorization and constrain CO MEs and gluon densities, while Higgs-associated production remains too small to detect. The findings underscore the potential of these associated-production channels as probes of quarkonium production dynamics and PDFs at current and future colliders.
Abstract
We investigate the associated production of heavy quarkonia, with angular-momentum quantum numbers ^{2S+1}L_J = ^1S_0, ^3S_1, ^1P_1, ^3P_J (J = 0, 1, 2), and photons, Z bosons, and W bosons in photon-photon, photon-hadron, and hadron-hadron collisions within the factorization formalism of nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics providing all contributing partonic cross sections in analytic form. In the case of photoproduction, we also include the resolved-photon contributions. We present numerical results for the processes involving J/psi and chi_{cJ} mesons appropriate for the Fermilab Tevatron, CERN LHC, DESY TESLA, operated in the e^+ e^- and gamma gamma modes, and DESY THERA.