Review of quarkonium production: status and prospects

Abstract

Production cross sections of heavy quarkonia are considered as useful tools to study various aspects of QCD. We have entered a new era of quarkonium production phenomenology, with the help of new measurements from the LHC giving access to more varieties of observables, and recent theoretical developments that provided us a better understanding of the short-distance process in which quarkonia are produced. With a more concrete understanding of perturbative corrections and a prolific collection of data, a satisfactory description of the quarkonium production mechanism might now be within reach. Unfortunately, the exact mechanism of quarkonium production still remains elusive. Even analyses based on the same formalism can lead to different descriptions of the production process and give contradicting predictions of processes involving heavy quarkonia. This implies that there are much more physics yet to be understood and much work yet to be done in quarkonium production phenomenology. In this paper, we review the current status of theoretical approaches and discuss possible strategies that may improve our understanding of heavy quarkonium production.