Feasibility Studies for Quarkonium Production at a Fixed-Target Experiment Using the LHC Proton and Lead Beams (AFTER@LHC)

Abstract

Being used in the fixed-target mode, the multi-TeV LHC proton and lead beams allow for studies of heavy-flavour hadroproduction with unprecedented precision at backward rapidities, far negative Feynman-x, using conventional detection techniques. At the nominal LHC energies, quarkonia can be studied in detail inp+p,p+d, andp+Acollisions atsNN≃115 GeV and in Pb +pand Pb +Acollisions atsNN≃72 GeV with luminosities roughly equivalent to that of the collider mode that is up to 20 fb−1 yr−1inp+pandp+dcollisions, up to 0.6 fb−1 yr−1inp+Acollisions, and up to 10 nb−1 yr−1in Pb +Acollisions. In this paper, we assess the feasibility of such studies by performing fast simulations using the performance of a LHCb-like detector.