Abstract

A long standing problem in quarkonium physics is the disagreement between the measured polarization of the J/psi produced at large transverse momentum in proton-antiproton collisions and the theoretical prediction based on non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD). I will argue that the NRQCD approach is incomplete, and suffers from large logarithmic contributions that may invalidate the theoretical predictions. I derive a new factorization formula for the differential cross section for the production of a heavy quarkonium state at large transverse momentum, and show how the large logarithms in NRQCD are summed in this formalism. I comment on how this formalism may change the prediction of the J/psi polarization, though a definitive answer will have to wait for a complete calculation.