Measurement of Charmonium Production in $p + p$ and $p + d$ Interactions in the Fermilab SeaQuest Experiment

TL;DR

The SeaQuest experiment measured charmonium production in proton-proton and proton-deuterium collisions at 120GeV, providing insights into quark and gluon distributions through differential cross sections and model comparisons.

Contribution

This work presents the first measurements of charmonium production ratios and cross sections in $p + p$ and $p + d$ interactions at Fermilab, comparing results with theoretical models.

Findings

The $\sigma^{pd}/2 \sigma^{pp}$ ratio for charmonium differs from Drell-Yan.

Differential cross sections align with Color Evaporation and NRQCD models.

Charmonium production is sensitive to both quark and gluon distributions.

Abstract

The Fermilab SeaQuest experiment has measured dimuon events from the interactions of 120GeV proton beam on liquid hydrogen and deuterium targets with dimuon mass between 2 and 9GeV. These dimuon events contain both the Drell-Yan process and the charmonium ($J/\psi$ and $\psi^\prime$) production. Unlike the Drell-Yan process which probes the antiquark distributions in the nucleons, the charmonium production is sensitive to both quark and gluon distributions. SeaQuest has extracted the $\sigma^{pd}/2\sigma^{pp}$ ratio as well as the differential cross sections for charmonium production in the kinematic region of $0.4 < x_F < 0.9$. The $\sigma^{pd}/2\sigma^{pp}$ ratio for charmonium production are found to be significantly different from that of the Drell-Yan process. The measured differential cross sections for charmonium production are compared with theoretical calculations using Color Evaporation Model and Non-Relativistic QCD model.