On theoretical uncertainty of color dipole phenomenology in the J/ψ and Υ photoproduction in pA and AA collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

We investigate the theoretical uncertainty of the predictions for the photo-production of J/psi and Upsilon states in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) within the color dipole formalism. Predictions for the rapidity distributions are presented and the dependence on the meson wavefunction, heavy quark mass as well as the models for the dipole cross section are analyzed. We compare the theoretical results directly with recent data from the ALICE Collaboration on J/psi production in pPb collisions at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of 5.02 TeV and in PbPb collisions at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of 2.76 TeV. Predictions are also performed for Upsilon state in PbPb and pPb collisions at LHC energies, including the coherent and incoherent contributions.