Daniël Boer's Physics Webpage

Topic 2: Quarkonium production processes

Description & objectives:

Quarkonia are bound states of a quark and an antiquark, where usually one means the heavy charm or bottom quarks. The first such state, the charmonium particle nowadays called J/ψ, was discovered in 1974 (earning Burton Richter and Samuel Ting the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics). The first bottomonium state was discovered in 1977. Despite that these discoveries were made long ago and quarkonia are produced in large amounts at particle colliders, the quarkonium production mechanism itself is still not fully understood. There is not a single study that can describe all available data well simultaneously. My objective is to suggest ways to resolve this problem by combining specific studies at the LHC and the future EIC. This can best be done in combination with the study of certain gluon distributions, since the quarkonia are produced mostly from gluon initiated processes, so hopefully we can tackle these two objectives simultaneously.

Selected scientific highlights:

Funding:

For part of my research on this topic I have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 824093 (STRONG 2020).