Project Details
Projekt
NNLO Quarkonium Production at the EIC
Applicant
Dr. Mathias Butenschön
Subject Area
Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409651613
Heavy quarkonia offer a unique environment to study the interplay of perturbative and nonperturbative QCD phenomena. This developing active field sees rapid progress on both theoretical and experimental sides. While exclusive near-threshold quarkonium production at the EIC will help understand how gluons and quarks contribute to the hadron mass, inclusive EIC quarkonium production data will be crucial to our understanding of hadron formation itself, since it will help us discriminate between various production modes. The most elaborate theory framework for inclusive quarkonium production is currently given by nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD). Our group thereby has pioneered and is still at the front of performing higher-order NRQCD cal- culations and respective phenomenological analyses. Current next-to-leading order (NLO) analyses, however, hint at tensions in particular in the combined analysis of electron-proton (ep) and proton-proton (pp) collision data. While quarkonium hadroproduction data have become very precise and diverse in the LHC era, the ep collision data from HERA still suffered from restricted statistics and kinematic ranges. This is why the highly anticipated EIC results are going to deliver for ep collisions a revolutionary effect, similar to the one LHC had for hadroproduction observables. But to resolve present data-theory tensions and to keep up with the advance in experimental precision, we also need to extend our theoretical analyses to the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). These NNLO calculations are the content of this project, with the concrete aim of having full NNLO NRQCD predictions for EIC photoproduction by the end of the project, possibly even for DIS. These NNLO calculations are extremely challenging. By implementing the reverse unitarity method, we are also introducing completely new technology in the field of NRQCD calculations.
DFG Programme
Research Units
