Exclusive heavy vector meson photoproduction on nuclei in NLO perturbative QCD

Abstract: We make predictions for the cross section of coherent $J/\psi$ photoproduction in Pb-Pb and O-O ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) at the LHC as a function of the $J/\psi$ rapidity $y$ in the framework of collinear factorization and next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD. We quantify the strong scale dependence and significant uncertainties due to nuclear PDFs and show that our approach provides a reasonable description of the LHC data on coherent $J/\psi$ photoproduction in Pb-Pb UPCs. We demonstrate that these uncertainties are reduced by approximately a factor of 10 in the scaled ratio of the O-O and Pb-Pb UPC cross sections. Our analysis indicates the dominance of the quark contribution to the UPC cross section at central rapidities, which affects the interpretation of the UPC data.