eta_c production at the Large Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper predicts large eta_c production rates at the LHC using NRQCD, suggesting early LHC data can test the theory's accuracy for charmonium states.

Contribution

It applies NRQCD with heavy-quark symmetry to eta_c production, providing predictions for LHC experiments and proposing a test of NRQCD's validity.

Findings

NRQCD predicts high eta_c production cross-section at LHC

Early LHC data can test NRQCD predictions for eta_c

Potential to validate or challenge NRQCD in charmonium production

Abstract

We have studied the production of the 1S_0 charmonium state, eta_c, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the framework of Non-Relativistic Quantum Chromodynamics (NRQCD) using heavy-quark symmetry. We find that NRQCD predicts a large production cross-section for this resonance at the LHC even after taking account the small branching ratio of eta_c into two photons. We show that it will be possible to test NRQCD through its predictions for eta_c, with the statistics that will be achieved at the early stage of the LHC, running at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV with an integrated luminosity of 100 pb^{-1}