Bridging light-cone and NRQCD approaches: asymptotic behavior of B c electromagnetic form factor

Abstract

This work aims at illustrating that, for a class of leading-twist hard exclusive reactions involving two heavy quarkonia, the light-cone approach, when equipped with the strategy of refactorization of the light-cone distribution amplitude of quarkonium, can be employed to elegantly reproduce the corresponding predictions made in the nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization approach, order by order in perturbative expansion. Taking the electromagnetic form factor of the $B_c$ meson at large momentum transfer, $Q^2$, as a concrete example, we compare the results obtained from both NRQCD-based and light-cone-based calculations through the next-to-leading order (NLO) in $\alpha_s$, while at the leading order (LO) in both velocity and $1/Q^2$ expansion, and explicitly confirm their mutual agreement. As a byproduct, we apply our NLO result to explore certain features about the asymptotic behavior of the heavy-light meson form factor. We also address the major theoretical obstacles that prevent us from establishing an analogous equivalence between these two approaches for the double charmonium production process of phenomenological interest, $e^+e^-\to J/\psi+\eta_c$.