New contributions to heavy-quarkonium production

We reconsider quarkonium production in a field-theoretical setting and we show that the lowest-order mechanism for heavy-quarkonium production receives in general contributions from two different cuts. The first one corresponds to the usual colour-singlet mechanism. The second one has not been considered so far. We treat it in a gauge-invariant manner, and introduce new 4-point vertices, suggestive of the colour-octet mechanism. These new objects enable us to go beyond the static approximation. We show that the contribution of the new cut can be as large as the usual colour-singlet mechanism at high P-T for J/psi. In the psi' case, theoretical uncertainties are shown to be large and agreement with data is possible. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.