Near Threshold Heavy Quarkonium Photoproduction at Large Momentum Transfer

Abstract

Perturbative QCD is applied to investigate the near threshold heavy quarkonium photoproduction at large momentum transfer. We take into account the contributions from the leading three-quark Fock states of the nucleon. The dominant contribution comes from the three-quark Fock state with one unit quark orbital angular momentum (OAM) whereas that from zero quark OAM is suppressed at the threshold. From our analysis, we also show that there is no direct connection between the near threshold heavy quarkonium photoproduction and the gluonic gravitational form factors of the nucleon. Based on the comparison between our result and recent GlueX data of $J/\psi$ photoproduction, we make predictions for $\psi'$ and $\Upsilon$ (1S,2S) states which can be tested in future experiments.