Fully-heavy tetraquark production by $\gamma \gamma$ interactions in hadronic collisions at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper predicts the production rates of fully-heavy tetraquarks in photon-photon interactions during various collisions at the LHC, suggesting experimental feasibility to explore these exotic states.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed predictions for fully-heavy tetraquark production in photon-photon interactions at the LHC, focusing on resonance-mediated processes.

Findings

Predicted cross sections for $T_{4c}$ and $T_{4b}$ production.

Feasibility of experimental detection at LHC.

Potential to study properties of heavy tetraquarks.

Abstract

We investigate the production of the fully - heavy tetraquark states $T_{4Q}$ in the $\gamma \gamma$ interactions present in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We focus on the $\gamma \gamma \rightarrow {\cal{Q}}{\cal{Q}}$ (${\cal{Q}} = J/\psi,\, \Upsilon$) subprocess, mediated by the $T_{4Q}$ resonance in the $s$ - channel, and present predictions for the hadronic cross sections considering the kinematical ranges probed by the ALICE and LHCb Collaborations. Our results demonstrate that the experimental study of this process is feasible and can be used to investigate the existence and properties of the $T_{4c}(6900)$ and $T_{4b}(19000)$ states.