Production of $f_0(980)$ meson at the LHC: Color evaporation versus color-singlet gluon-gluon fusion

Abstract

The production of the $f_0(980)$ meson at high energies is not well understood. We investigate two different potential mechanisms for inclusive scalar meson production in the $k_t$-factorization approach: color-singlet gluon-gluon fusion and color evaporation model. The ${\gamma }^{\ast }{\gamma }^{\ast }\to f_0(980)$ form factor(s) can be constraint from the $f_0(980)$ radiative decay width. The $g^{\ast }{g}^{\ast }\to f_0(980)$ form factors are obtained by a replacement of ${\alpha }_{\mathrm{em}}$ electromagnetic coupling constant by ${\alpha }_{\mathrm{s}}$ strong coupling constant and appropriate color factors. The form factors for the two couplings are parametrized with a function motivated by recent results for scalar quarkonia. The differential cross sections are calculated in the $k_t$-factorization approach with modern unintegrated gluon distributions. Unlike for quarkonia it seems rather difficult to describe a preliminary ALICE data for inclusive production of $f_0(980)$ exclusively by the color singlet gluon-gluon fusion mechanism. Two different scenarios for flavor structure of $f_0(980)$ are considered in this context. We consider also mechanism of fusion of quark-antiquark associated with soft gluon emission in a phenomenological color evaporation model (CEM) used sometimes for quarkonium production. Here we use $k_t$-factorization version of CEM to include higher-order contributions. In addition, for comparison we consider also NLO collinear approach with $q\bar{q}q$ and $q\bar{q}g$ color octet partonic final states. Both approaches lead to a similar result. However, very large probabilities are required to describe the preliminary ALICE data. The pomeron-pomeron fusion mechanism is also discussed and results are quantified.

20 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (14)

• Parton distributions in the LHC era: MMHT 2014 PDFs
• A Theory of Scalar Mesons
• The CCFM Monte Carlo generator CASCADE 2.2.0
• Measurement of the total cross section from elastic scattering in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
• High statistics study of f_0(980) resonance in gamma gamma --> pi^+ pi^- production
• High-statistics measurement of neutral-pion pair production in two-photon collisions
• High-statistics measurement of neutral-pion pair production in two-photon collisions
• Measurement of the resonant and CP components in ${\overline{B}}^0\to J/\psi {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ decays
• On the role of heavy flavor parton distributions at high energy colliders
• Hard scale dependent gluon density, saturation and forward-forward dijet production at the LHC
• Hadroproduction of scalar $P$-wave quarkonia in the light-front $k_T$-factorization approach
• Structure of Light Scalar Mesons from D_s and D^0 Non-Leptonic Decays
• Study of central exclusive ${\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ production in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=$ 5.02 and 13 TeV
• Exclusive central diffractive production of scalar, pseudoscalar and vector mesons

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Production of exotic hadrons in $pp$ and nuclear collisions
• Quark-antiquark states of the lightest scalar mesons within the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with flavor-dependent coupling constants
• Two-gluon production of $\varphi$ and ${\eta }^{\prime }$ mesons in proton-proton collisions at high energies
• Production of $f_2(1270)$ meson in $pp$ collisions at the LHC via gluon-gluon fusion in the $k_t$-factorization approach
• ${\mathrm{f}}_0(980)$ production in inelastic pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=5.02$ TeV
• From transition electromagnetic form factors ${\gamma }^{\ast }{\gamma }^{\ast }{\eta }_c(1S,2S)$ to the production of ${\eta }_c(1S,2S)$ at the LHC