Fully-heavy tetraquark production by $\gamma \gamma$ interactions in hadronic collisions at the LHC

Abstract

We investigate the production of the fully - heavy tetraquark states $T_{4Q}$ in the $\gamma \gamma$ interactions present in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We focus on the $\gamma \gamma \rightarrow {\cal{Q}}{\cal{Q}}$ (${\cal{Q}} = J/\psi,\, \Upsilon$) subprocess, mediated by the $T_{4Q}$ resonance in the $s$ - channel, and present predictions for the hadronic cross sections considering the kinematical ranges probed by the ALICE and LHCb Collaborations. Our results demonstrate that the experimental study of this process is feasible and can be used to investigate the existence and properties of the $T_{4c}(6900)$ and $T_{4b}(19000)$ states.