Exclusive heavy vector meson production at next-to-leading order in the dipole picture

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order corrections for exclusive heavy vector meson production in the dipole picture, highlighting the importance of QCD and relativistic effects for phenomenology and proton structure analysis.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed NLO calculation including both QCD and relativistic corrections for heavy vector meson production in the dipole model.

Findings

QCD and relativistic corrections are numerically significant for J/ψ production.

Results are directly applicable to phenomenological studies.

Vector meson production offers complementary insights into proton structure at small x.

Abstract

We calculate exclusive production of a longitudinally polarized heavy vector meson at next-to-leading order in the dipole picture. The large quark mass allows us to separately include both the first QCD correction proportional to the coupling constant $\alpha_s$, and the first relativistic correction suppressed by the quark velocity $v^2$. Both of these corrections are found to be numerically important in $\mathrm{J}/\psi$ production. The results obtained are directly suitable for phenomenological calculations. We also demonstrate how vector meson production provides complementary information to structure function analyses when one extracts the initial condition for the energy evolution of the proton small-$x$ structure.