h_c Production at Hadron Colliders

Abstract

In this paper, we present the study of the hadroproduction rate of $h_c$ at next-to-leading order in $\alpha_s$ under the nonrelativisitic QCD (NRQCD) factorization framework, using long-distance matrix elements obtained from the fit of $\chi_c$ production measurements by LHCb. We consider the problem of NRQCD scale dependence for the first time, and find that, for some experimental conditions, the choice of this scale can substantially affect the final results. Up to this order, color-octet channel still contribute the most part of the production rate.