Exclusive heavy vector meson production at next-to-leading order in the dipole picture

Abstract

We calculate exclusive production of a longitudinally polarized heavy vector meson at next-to-leading order in the dipole picture. The large quark mass allows us to separately include both the first QCD correction proportional to the coupling constant $α_s$, and the first relativistic correction suppressed by the quark velocity $v^2$. Both of these corrections are found to be numerically important in $\mathrm{J}/ψ$ production. The results obtained are directly suitable for phenomenological calculations. We also demonstrate how vector meson production provides complementary information to structure function analyses when one extracts the initial condition for the energy evolution of the proton small-$x$ structure.