Inclusive production of fully charmed tetraquarks at the LHC

Abstract

The $X(6900)$ resonance, originally discovered by the LHCb Collaboration and later confirmed by both the ATLAS and CMS experiments, has sparked broad interest in the fully charmed tetraquark states. Relative to the mass spectra and decay properties of fully heavy tetraquarks, our knowledge on their production mechanism is still rather limited. In this work, we investigate the inclusive production of fully charmed $S$-wave tetraquarks at the LHC within the nonrelativistic QCD factorization framework. The partonic cross sections are computed at lowest order in ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{s}$ and velocity, while the long-distance nonrelativistic QCD matrix elements are estimated from phenomenological potential models. We predict the differential ${p}_{T}$ spectra of various fully charmed $S$-wave tetraquarks at the LHC and compare with the results predicted from the fragmentation mechanism at the large-${p}_{T}$ end.