Diffractive Production of Heavy Quarkonia at the Electron Ion Collider

Abstract

We study diffractive photo- and electroproduction of the $S$-wave heavy quarkonia $J/ψ$, $ψ(2S)$, and $Υ(nS)$ at energies relevant for the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). The production amplitude is evaluated while retaining the full transverse-momentum ($\ell_t$) dependence of the hard two-gluon kernel, that is, without expanding the impact-parameter Bessel kernel as is done in the small-size color-dipole limit. The quarkonia light-cone wave functions are built from Cornell-potential solutions of the Schrödinger equation, normalized to the measured leptonic widths, and combined with a modern collinear gluon distribution. After benchmarking the framework against the full set of HERA charmonium cross-section ratio data, we provide a consistent set of bottomonium cross-section ratio predictions in EIC kinematics. We find that the full $\ell_t$-resolved treatment systematically improves the description of the radially excited states relative to the leading dipole limit, and we identify the kinematic windows where this difference is largest.