Exclusive J/$\psi$ Detection and Physics with ECCE

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the ECCE detector's performance in detecting exclusive J/ψ production at the EIC, highlighting its potential to probe gluon distributions and the origin of hadron mass through quarkonium production.

Contribution

It presents the capabilities of the ECCE detector for exclusive J/ψ detection and explores its potential for studying gluon distributions and hadron mass origin.

Findings

ECCE can effectively detect exclusive J/ψ events.

The process is sensitive to gluon spatial distributions.

Potential to investigate the trace anomaly and gluon condensate.

Abstract

Exclusive heavy quarkonium photoproduction is one of the most popular processes in EIC, which has a large cross section and a simple final state. Due to the gluonic nature of the exchange Pomeron, this process can be related to the gluon distributions in the nucleus. The momentum transfer dependence of this process is sensitive to the interaction sites, which provides a powerful tool to probe the spatial distribution of gluons in the nucleus. Recently the problem of the origin of hadron mass has received lots of attention in determining the anomaly contribution $M_{a}$. The trace anomaly is sensitive to the gluon condensate, and exclusive production of quarkonia such as J/$\psi$ and $\Upsilon$ can serve as a sensitive probe to constrain it. In this paper, we present the performance of the ECCE detector for exclusive J/$\psi$ detection and the capability of this process to investigate the above physics opportunities with ECCE.