h_c production at the Tevatron

Non-Relativistic QCD (NRQCD) has provided a consistent framework for the physics of quarkonia. The colour-octet Fock components predicted by NRQCD have important implications for the phenomenology of quarkonium production in experiments. We have considered the consequences of the colour-octet channels for the production of the $^1P_1$ charmonium state, $h_c$, at large-p_T at the Tevatron. The colour-octet contributions to this state are found to be dominant and give a reasonably large rate for the production of $h_c$. This should make it feasible to look for this resonance in the $J/\psi +\pi$ decay channel. The observation of $h_c$ is interesting in its own right, since its existence has yet to be experimentally confirmed. Moreover, this rate is a prediction of NRQCD, and the observation of the $h_c$ at the Tevatron can, therefore, be used as a test of NRQCD.

K. Sridhar · 1997