11th International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions

We present the first study of coherent exclusive quarkonium (J/psi, Upsilon) photoproduction in ultraperipheral nucleus-nucleus collisions (UPCs) at the LHC in the framework of collinear factorization and next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD. We make predictions for the J/psi and Upsilon rapidity distributions for the cases of lead (Pb) and oxygen (O) beams and quantify their dependence on the choice of the hard scale, nuclear PDFs and their uncertainties, and models for nuclear generalized parton distribution functions (GPDs). We demonstrate that our approach provides a simultaneously good description of all available Run 1 and Run 2 LHC data on J/psi photoproduction in Pb-Pb UPCs and makes definite predictions for photoproduction of heavy quarkonia in heavy-ion UPCs at the LHC.