Exclusive $J/\psi$ process tamed to probe the low $x$ gluon

Abstract

We address the question as to whether data for J/\psi mesons produced exclusively in the forward direction at the LHC can be used in global parton analyses (based on collinear factorization) to pin down the low x gluon PDF. We show that it may be possible to overcome the problems that (i) the process is described by a skewed or Generalized Parton Distribution (GPD), (ii) it is very sensitive to the choice of factorization scale and (iii) there is bad LO, NLO,... perturbative stability to the predictions. However, we start by briefly explaining how the alternative k_T factorization approach has been used to describe the process.