Double-quarkonium production at a fixed-target experiment at the LHC (AFTER@LHC)

TL;DR

This paper predicts double-quarkonium production rates at the proposed AFTER@LHC fixed-target experiment, highlighting the potential to study double-parton and single-parton scatterings through differential distributions.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed predictions for double-quarkonium production at AFTER@LHC, including contributions from double- and single-parton scatterings.

Findings

Large yields for double-charmonium production at AFTER@LHC

Differential distributions can probe double-parton scatterings

Potential sensitivity to double intrinsic c-bar(c) coalescence at large negative Feynman x

Abstract

We present predictions for double-quarkonium production in the kinematical region relevant for the proposed fixed-target experiment using the LHC beams (dubbed as AFTER@LHC). These include all spin-triplet S -wave charmonium and bottomonium pairs, i.e. Psi(n_1S) + Psi(n_2S), Psi(n_1S) + Upsilon(m_1S) and Upsilon(m_1S) + Upsilon(m_2S ) with n_1,n_2 = 1,2 and m_1,m_2 = 1,2,3. We calculate the contributions from double-parton scatterings and single-parton scatterings. With an integrated luminosity of 20 fb-1 to be collected at AFTER@LHC, we find that the yields for double-charmonium production are large enough for differential distribution measurements. We discuss some differential distributions for J/Psi + J/Psi production, which can help to study the physics of double-parton and single-parton scatterings in a new energy range and which might also be sensitive to double intrinsic c-bar(c) coalescence at large negative Feynman x.