In this paper, we review the current status of the phenomenological study of quarkonium production in high energy collisions. After a brief introduction of several important models and effective field theories for quarkonium production, we discuss the comparisons between theoretical predictions and experimental measurements.
Charmonia with different transverse momentum $p_T$ usually comes from different mechanisms in the relativistic heavy ion collisions. This work tries to review the theoretical studies on quarkonium evolutions in the deconfined medium produced in p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions. The charmonia with high $p_T$ are mainly from the initial hadronic collisions, and therefore sensitive to the initial energy density of the bulk medium. For those charmonia within $0.1<p_T<5$ GeV/c at the energies of Large Hadron Collisions (LHC), They are mainly produced by the recombination of charm and anti-charm quarks in the medium. In the extremely low $p_Tsim 1/R_A$ ($R_A$ is the nuclear radius), additional contribution from the coherent interactions between electromagnetic fields generated by one nucleus and the target nucleus plays a non-negligible role in the $J/psi$ production even in semi-central Pb-Pb collisions.
Charmonium suppression in hot and dense nuclear matter has been argued to be a signature for the production of the quark gluon plasma (QGP). In order to search for this effect in heavy ion collisions one must have a clear understanding of all the factors that can contribute to such a suppression. These may include shadowing of the partons in a nuclear environment, breakup of a correlated $c-bar{c}$ pair as it traverses the nuclear fragment, suppression of feed-down from higher mass states as well as other initial state interactions. In order to disentangle these effects one must measure charmonium production rates in both proton+proton (p+p) and proton+nucleus (p+A) collisions. The p+p collisions serve as a baseline for searching for suppression compared to binary scaling predictions, allow one to quantify the amount of feed-down from higher states as well as serve as a tool to distinguish between different theoretical calculations for charmonium production mechanisms. In order to quantify nuclear effects it is also necessary to study charmonium production in p+A collisions where the temperature and density of the system are low compared to a heavy ion collision. These measurements allow one to determine the influence of nuclear shadowing and breakup in cold nuclear matter which can be extrapolated to heavy ion collisions in order to determine the amount anomalous suppression. Of course, extrapolations that rely on a model based technique depend heavily on the assumption of a production mechanism, a fact that reinforces the importance of the p+p measurements...
In the past years there has been a revival of hadron spectroscopy. Many interesting new hadron states were discovered experimentally, some of which do not fit easily into the quark model. This situation motivated a vigorous theoretical activity. This is a rapidly evolving field with enormous amount of new experimental information. In the present report we include and discuss data which were released very recently. The present review is the first one written from the perspective of QCD sum rules (QCDSR), where we present the main steps of concrete calculations and compare the results with other approaches and with experimental data.
We first present an introduction to the theory of hard exclusive processes. We then illustrate this theory by a few selected examples. The last part is devoted to the most recent developments in the asymptotical energy limit.
In this paper we summarize our recent results for low energy associated charmonium production cross sections, using 1) crossing symmetry, and 2) an explicit hadronic model. These predictions are of relevance to the planned charmonium and charmonium hybrid production experiment PANDA at GSI.