Next-to-Next-to-Leading-Order Radiative Corrections to $e^+e^-\to\chi_{cJ}+\gamma$ at $B$ factory

TL;DR

This paper calculates the second-order radiative corrections to the production of P-wave charmonium states with a photon at B factories, verifying NRQCD factorization and analyzing the impact on production rates and experimental detectability.

Contribution

First explicit verification of NRQCD factorization at two-loop order for exclusive P-wave quarkonium production and detailed NNLO correction analysis.

Findings

NNLO corrections are smaller than NLO for $ ext{chi}_{cJ}$ channels.

Predictions for $ ext{chi}_{c1}+ ext{gamma}$ are stable against scale variations.

Large corrections for $ ext{chi}_{c2}+ ext{gamma}$ reduce the cross section significantly.

Abstract

Within the nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization framework, we have computed the ${\mathcal O}(\alpha_s^2)$ corrections to the exclusive production of $P$-wave spin-triplet charmonia $\chi_{cJ}(J=0,1,2)$ accompanied by a hard photon at $B$ factories. For the first time, we have explicitly verified the validity of NRQCD factorization for exclusive $P$-wave quarkonium production at two-loop order. Unlike the $\chi_{cJ}$ electromagnetic decay processes, the $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^2)$ corrections are found to be smaller than the $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s)$ corrections in all three channels $e^+e^-\to \chi_{c0,1,2}+\gamma$. In particular, the ${\mathcal O}(\alpha_s^2)$ corrections appear moderate for $\chi_{c1}$ case, and insignificant for $\chi_{c0}$. In addition, the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) predictions for the production rates of $\chi_{c0,1}+\gamma$ are insensitive to the renormalization and factorization scales. All of these features may indicate that perturbative expansion in these two channels exhibits a decent convergence behavior. By contrast, both the ${\mathcal O}(\alpha_s)$ and ${\mathcal O}(\alpha_s^2)$ corrections to the $\chi_{c2}+\gamma$ production cross section are sizable, which even reduces the Born order cross section by one order of magnitude after including the NNLO perturbative correction. Taking the values of the long-distance NRQCD matrix elements from nonrelativistic potential model, our prediction to $\chi_{c1}+\gamma$ production rate is consistent with the recent {\tt Belle} measurement. The NNLO predictions for the $\chi_{c0,2}+\gamma$ production rates are much smaller than that for $\chi_{c1}+\gamma$, which seems to naturally explain why the $e^+e^-\to \chi_{c0,2}+\gamma$ channels have escaped experimental detection to date.