Studying hard exclusive production of heavy vector mesons to access the Generalized Parton Distributions of protons

Heavy meson production is a key tool for accessing the Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) of protons. GPDs are functions that correlate the partons’ longitudinal momenta and their transverse distribution. The Hard Exclusive Production of Quarkonia (J/ψ, Υ...) is particularly interesting as it accesses the gluon GPDs at the lowest order in QCD.

We used ROOT to create a new flexible generator for the photoproduction, quasi-photoproduction, and electroproduction of heavy vector mesons off a proton, with specific focus on the production of J/ψ, and Υ mesons. The output phase space is weighted by the reaction cross-section, creating a realistic graph of event count as a function of energy. We will discuss the interests of measuring hard exclusive production of Quarkonia, present our work on the event generator, our projections for EIC and discuss these results.