Heavy quarkonium production at high transverse momentum ($p_T$) in hadronic collisions is explored in the QCD factorization approach. We find that the leading power in the $1/p_T$ expansion is responsible for high $p_T$ regime, while the next-to-leading power contribution is necessary for the low $p_T$ region. We present the first numerical analysis of the scale evolution of coupled twist-2 and twist-4 fragmentation functions (FFs) for heavy quarkonium production and demonstrate that the QCD factorization approach is capable of describing the $p_T$ spectrum of hadronic $J/psi$ production at the LHC.
We discuss heavy quarkonium production through parton fragmentation, including a review of arguments for the factorization of high-p_T particles into fragmentation functions for hadronic initial states. We investigate the further factorization of fragmentation functions in the NRQCD formalism, and argue that this requires a modification of NRQCD octet production matrix elements to include nonabelian phases, which makes them gauge invariant. We describe the calculation of uncanceled infrared divergences in fragmentation functions that must be factorized at NNLO, and verify that they are absorbed into the new, gauge invariant matrix elements.
Quarkonium production in high-energy proton (deuteron)-nucleus collisions is investigated in the color glass condensate framework. We employ the color evaporation model assuming that the quark pair produced from dense small-x gluons in the nuclear target bounds into a quarkonium outside the target. The unintegrated gluon distribution at small Bjorken x in the nuclear target is treated with the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation with running coupling corrections. For the gluons in the proton, we examine two possible descriptions, unintegrated gluon distribution and ordinary collinear gluon distribution. We present the transverse momentum spectrum and nuclear modification factor for J/psi production at RHIC and LHC energies, and those for Upsilon(1S) at LHC energy, and discuss the nuclear modification factor and the momentum broadening by changing the rapidity and the initial saturation scale.
The widely used nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization theory now encounters some notable difficulties in describing quarkonium production. This may be due to the inadequate treatment of soft hadrons emitted in the hadronization process, which causes bad convergence of velocity expansion in NRQCD. In this paper, starting from QCD we propose a rigorously defined factorization approach, soft gluon factorization (SGF), to better deal with the effects of soft hadrons. After a careful velocity expansion, the SGF can be as simple as the NRQCD factorization in phenomenological studies, but has a much better convergence. The SGF may provide a new insight to understand the mechanisms of quarkonium production and decay.
We study the transition of a heavy quark pair from octet to singlet color configurations at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in heavy quarkonium production. We show that the infrared singularities in this process are consistent with NRQCD factorization to all orders in the heavy quark relative velocity v. This factorization requires the gauge-completed matrix elements that we introduced previously to prove NNLO factorization to order v ^2.
We discuss factorization in heavy quarkonium production in high energy collisions using NRQCD. Infrared divergences at NNLO are not matched by conventional NRQCD matrix elements. However, we show that gauge invariance and factorization require that conventional NRQCD production matrix elements be modified to include Wilson lines or non-abelian gauge links. With this modification NRQCD factorization for heavy quarkonium production is restored at NNLO.