Study on $\eta_{c2}(\eta_{b2})$ electromagnetic decay into double photons

TL;DR

This paper calculates the electromagnetic decay widths of $ ext{eta}_{Q2}$ mesons into two photons using NNLO NRQCD, verifies the factorization at this order, and estimates their production and detection prospects at LHCb.

Contribution

First NNLO NRQCD calculation of $ ext{eta}_{Q2}$ electromagnetic decay widths and verification of factorization validity for D-wave quarkonium decays.

Findings

Decay widths are significantly suppressed by higher-order corrections.

Estimated production cross sections suggest feasible detection of $ ext{eta}_{c2}$ at LHCb.

Small branching ratio makes detection of $ ext{eta}_{b2}$ challenging.

Abstract

Within the framework of nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization formalism, we compute the helicity amplitude as well as the decay width of $\eta_{Q2}$ ($Q=c,b$) electromagnetic decay into two photons up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in $\alpha_s$ expansion. For the first time, we verify the validity of NRQCD factorization for the D-wave quarkonium decay at NNLO. We find that the $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s)$ and $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^2)$ corrections to the helicity amplitude are negative and moderate, nevertheless both corrections combine to suppress the leading-order prediction for the decay width significantly. By approximating the total decay width of $\eta_{Q2}$ as the sum of those for the hadronic decay and the electric $E1$ transition, we obtain the branching ratios ${\rm Br}(\eta_{c2}\to 2\gamma)\approx 5\times10^{-6}$ and ${\rm Br}(\eta_{b2}\to 2\gamma)\approx 4\times10^{-7}$. To explore the potential measurement on $\eta_{Q2}$, we further evaluate the production cross section of $\eta_{Q2}$ at LHCb at the lowest order in $\alpha_s$ expansion. With the kinematic constraint on the longitudinal rapidity $4.5>y>2$ and transverse momentum $P_T>(2-4)m_Q$ for $\eta_{Q2}$, we find the cross section can reach $2-50$ nb for $\eta_{c2}$, and $1-22$ pb for $\eta_{b2}$. Considering the integrated luminosity $\mathcal{L}=10\, {\rm fb}^{-1}$ at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV and $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV, we estimate that there are several hundreds events of $pp\to \eta_{c2}\to 2\gamma$. Since the background is relatively clean, it is promising to reconstruct $\eta_{c2}$ through its electromagnetic decay. On the contrary, due to small branching ratio and production cross section, it is quite challenging to detect $\eta_{b2}\to 2\gamma$ at LHCb.