Probing the gluon density of the proton in the exclusive photoproduction of vector mesons at the LHC: A phenomenological analysis

Understand

The current uncertainty on the gluon density extracted from the global parton analysis is large in the kinematical range of small values of the Bjorken - $x$ variable and low values of the hard scale $Q^2$.

• An alternative to reduces this uncertainty is the analysis of the exclusive vector meson photoproduction in photon - hadron and hadron - hadron collisions.
• This process offers a unique opportunity to constrain the gluon density of the proton, since its cross section is proportional to the gluon density squared.
• In this paper we consider current parametrizations for the gluon distribution and estimate the exclusive vector meson photoproduction cross section at HERA and LHC using the leading logarithmic formalism.