Photoproduction of the Bc() meson at the LHeC

We make a detailed study of the photoproduction mechanism of the doubly heavy flavored Bc(*) meson at the purposed Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) within the framework of nonrelativistic QCD. In addition to the photoproduction mechanism via the gluon-induced channel γ+g→Bc(*)+b+c¯, the extrinsic heavy quark mechanism via the two channels γ+c→Bc(*)+b and γ+b¯→Bc(*)+c¯ has also been studied. Those two extrinsic channels are generally suppressed by the heavy quark distribution functions in the proton, which provide significant contributions in the low and intermediate pT region. A detailed comparison of those channels together with the theoretical uncertainties has been presented. By summing up all the mentioned photoproduction channels, we observe that about (1.04−0.53+0.90)×105 Bc and (4.86−2.30+3.72)×105 Bc* events can be generated at the LHeC in one operation year with the proton-electron collision energy S=1.30 TeV and the luminosity L≃1033 cm−2 s−1. Here the errors are for mc=1.50±0.20 and mb=4.9±0.40 GeV. Thus, in addition to the hadronic experiments, the LHeC shall provide another helpful platform for studying the Bc(*) meson properties, especially to test the extrinsic heavy quark mechanism.