Diffractive heavy pseudoscalar-meson productions by weak neutral currents

Abstract

A first theoretical study for neutrino-induced diffractive productions of heavy pseudoscalar-mesons, \eta_c and \eta_b, off a nucleon is performed based on factorization formalism in QCD. We evaluate the forward diffractive production cross section in perturbative QCD in terms of the light-cone wave functions of Z boson and \eta_{c,b} mesons, and the gluon distribution of the nucleon. The diffractive production of \eta_c is governed by the axial vector coupling of the longitudinally polarized Z boson to Q\bar{Q} pair, and the resulting \eta_c production cross section is larger than the J/\psi one by one order of magnitude. The bottomonium \eta_b production, which shows up for higher beam energy, is also discussed.