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arXiv · 2608.30850

Exclusive Leptonium Electroproduction

Abstract

Purely leptonic bound states provide precision probes of QED. Positronium $(e^+e^-)$ and muonium $(\mu^+e^-)$ have long been observed, whereas dimuonium $(\mu^+\mu^-)$ and tauonium $(\tau^+\tau^-)$ remain undiscovered. We study exclusive vector-leptonium electroproduction in $ep$ collisions within nonrelativistic QED. We include the Bethe--Heitler and double deeply virtual Compton scattering contributions and their interference, and calculate the NLO QCD hard-scattering kernels entering the dominant Compton form factor $\Hcal$ within collinear GPD factorization. The NLO QCD correction to the DDVCS contribution changes from a strong suppression at low photon virtuality to a sizable enhancement as the lower virtuality cut is raised, with the gluon channel providing the dominant contribution. Bethe--Heitler production dominates the exclusive rate, supporting dedicated dimuonium searches at the EIC and JLab, with larger samples expected at higher-energy electron--proton colliders. The much larger positronium samples provide a high-statistics environment for precision QED studies, whereas tauonium production remains strongly suppressed.

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Hao-ye Deng, Qi-Ming Feng, Qi-Wei Hu, Si-Qin Huang, Cong-Feng Qiao, Jia-Xuan Shen, Ting-Ting Wang, Shun-Yan Yu, Hao Zhang, Xuan-Heng Zhang, Yi-Nan Zhao. 2026-08-31. Exclusive Leptonium Electroproduction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30850

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