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# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

The context of this research is a large-scale Dutch-Flemish project \`\`Corpus Gesproken Nederlands" (Corpus Spoken Dutch, CGN) in which a 10 million word spoken corpus is collected and linguistically annotated. One of the annotation layers is a representation of the pronunciation of the recorded speech (the phonemic representation). As available speech recognition technology is not yet up to generating this annotation automatically, it has to be produced from the (manually transcribed) orthographic transcription. The task is complicated by the fact that these pronunciation representations should reflect either Flemish (the variant of Dutch spoken in the North of Belgium) or Dutch pronunciation, depending on the origin of different parts of the corpus.

To generate the phonemic representations, we need accurate grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (the part of speech synthesis which converts spelling into phonemic representations). It can be described as a function mapping the spelling of words to their phonetic symbols. Since the spelling of a word is ambiguous regarding its pronunciation, what is a correct phonemic transcription is contextually determined. One of the possibilities to tackle the problem is to develop a system that captures the linguistic knowledge of a given language in a set of rules with the disadvantage that hand crafting linguistic rules is a rather difficult and time consuming task. Moreover, this task has to be restarted every time a grapheme-to-phoneme convertor is developed for a new language. Examples of knowledge-rich expert systems are those of Allen (1987) and of Divay and Vitale (1997). Manual encoding of linguistic information, however, is being challenged by data-driven methods since the extraction of linguistic knowledge from a sample text corpus can be a powerful method for overcoming the linguistic knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Different approaches have already been used, such as the use of learning algorithms to pronounce unknown words by analogy to familiar lexical items (Dedina & Nusbaum, 1991), decision-tree learning (Dietterich, 1997), a neural network or connectionist approach (Sejnowski & Rosenberg, 1987) or memory-based learning (Daelemans & van den Bosch, 1996). Data-driven approaches can yield comparable (and sometimes even more accurate) results than the rule-based approach.

In this paper, we are concerned with two questions. First, we investigate the level of accuracy that can be obtained using various machine learning techniques trained on two available lexical databases containing examples of the pronunciation of Flemish and Dutch. We examine whether one variant of Dutch can add valuable information to the prediction of the other in cascaded or stacked classifiers. Different individual classifiers were combined in order to obtain an improved estimator. In the machine learning literature, this approach is called ensemble, stacked or combined classifiers (Dietterich, 1997). The underlying idea is that, when the errors committed by the individual classifiers are uncorrelated to a sufficient degree and their error rate is low enough, the resulting combined classifier will perform better. This approach, while common in the Machine Learning literature, has only recently been introduced in natural language processing research (e.g., van Halteren, Zavrel, and Daelemans (1998) for word class disambiguation). In the research presented here, we discuss the combination of different classifiers trained on the same or slightly different tasks. This contrasts with other ensemble methods which combine subsets of the training data (as in bagging) or which combine multiple versions of the training data in which previously misclassified examples get more weight (as in boosting). In this paper, we empirically examine whether these combined classifiers result in substantial accuracy improvements in learning grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Our second research question concerns the use of rule induction as a method to model the systematicity implicit in the differences between Flemish and Dutch pronunciation.

The training data for our experiments consists of two lexical databases representing Dutch and Flemish. For Dutch, Celex (release 2) was used and for Flemish Fonilex (version 1.0b). The Celex database contains frequency information (based on the INL corpus), and phonological, morphological, and syntactic lexical information for more than 384,000 word forms, and uses the DISC representation as encoding scheme for word pronunciation. Fonilex is a list of more than 200,000 word forms together with their Flemish pronunciation. For each word form, an abstract lexical representation is given, together with the concrete pronunciation of that word form in three speech styles: highly formal speech, sloppy speech and \`\`normal'' speech (which is an intermediate level). A set of phonological rewrite rules was used to deduce these concrete speech styles from the abstract phonological form. The initial phonological transcription was obtained by a grapheme-to-phoneme converter and was afterwards corrected by hand. Fonilex uses YAPA (comparable to DISC) as encoding scheme. The Fonilex entries also contain a reference to the Celex entries, since Celex served as basis for the list of word forms in Fonilex. The word forms in Celex with a frequency of 1 and higher are included in Fonilex and from the list with frequency 0 (words not attested in a reference corpus), only the monomorphematic words were selected.

In the following section, we first explain our experimental setup, describing the data sets being used in the different experiments. An overview of the experiments is also provided. In section 3, we introduce the experimental methods and we go on to report the overall results of the experiments. Section 4 shows that the use of machine learning techniques, and especially the use of rule induction techniques, leads to an increased insight into the linguistic regularities determining the variation between the two pronunciation variants. In a final section we conclude with a summary of the most important observations.

## 2 Experimental Setup

The training data for the text-to-pronunciation experiments are two corpora, representing the Northern Dutch and Flemish variants. The data set we used consists of all Fonilex entries with omission of the double entries. In case of double word forms with different possible transcriptions, all different transcriptions were taken, as in the word \`\`caravan'', which can be phonemically represented as /kArAvAn/ or as /kErEvEn/. These double transcriptions only appear in Fonilex, which explains why the text-to-pronunciation task for Flemish is more difficult. Also words the phonemic transcription of which is longer than the orthography and for which no compound phonemes are provided, are omitted, e.g. "b'tje" (Eng.: \`\`little b'')(phonemically: /betj/). DISC is used as phonemic encoding scheme. All DISC phonemes are included and new phonemes are created for the phonemic symbols which only occur in the Fonilex data base.

Before passing the data through the machine learning program, alignment (Daelemans & van den Bosch, 1996) is performed for the graphemic and phonemic representations of Celex and for those of Fonilex, since the phonemic representation and the spelling of a word often differ in length. Therefore, the phonemic symbols are aligned with the graphemes of the written word form. In case the phonemic transcription is shorter than the spelling, null phonemes (/-/) are used to fill the gaps. In the example \`\`aalmoezenier'' (Eng.: \`\`chaplain'') this results in the following alignment:

A further step in the preparation of the data, consists of the use of an extensive set of so-called \`\`compound phonemes''. Compound phonemes are used whenever graphemes map with more than one phoneme, e.g. the word 'jubileum' aligns to /j}bIl\]}m/ in which the compound phoneme /\]/ stands for /ej/. Both alignment and the use of compound phonemes leads to a corpus consisting of 173,874 word forms or 1,769,891 phonemes for each of the variants.

In order to achieve the grapheme-to-phoneme mapping task, we used different approaches:

1. Training two single classifiers on lexical databases containing examples of the pronunciation of Dutch and Flemish, respectively, using memory-based learning.
2. Training classifiers for each pronunciation variant using the predicted output for the other as an additional information source in

* a cascaded approach and
    * classifier combination.
3. Trying to improve the results of classifier combination by combining the combination classifiers.

In these experiments, the text-to-pronunciation task is defined as the conversion of fixed-size instances representing the grapheme with a certain context to a class representing the target phoneme, as shown in Table 2, using a technique proposed by Sejnowski and Rosenberg (1987).

In the cascade and classifier combination experiments, the instances contain both graphemic and phonemic information. In this study, we choose a fixed window width of seven, which offers sufficient context information for adequate performance. Extending the window would make the meta-meta-classifier experiment computationally very costly.

In all experiments, except when explicitly mentioned otherwise, ten-fold cross-validation (Weiss & Kulikowski, 1991) is used as experimental method for error estimation. All experiments, both the component and combination experiments were performed on the same data set partitions for both variants of Dutch. E.g., in the classifier combination experiment, where output of both a classifier trained on Celex and a classifier trained on Fonilex is used as input, this parallel way of working is necessary, since it has to be avoided that one component classifier is trained on data held out in the training of the other component classifier. A non-parallel way of working could lead to over-optimistic accuracies for the classifier combination experiments.

## 3 Learning Dutch Word Pronunciation

In the following subsections a brief introduction is given to each approach, followed by a description of the experiments and a brief discussion of the results.

### 3.1 Single Classifiers

In order to obtain a high accuracy grapheme-to-phoneme convertor, different approaches were studied. In a first approach, one single classifier is trained on Fonilex and another classifier on Celex.

For this experiment we have made use of Timbl (Daelemans et al., 1999), a software package implementing several memory-based learning (lazy learning) techniques. Memory-based learning is a learning method which is based on storing all examples of a task in memory and then classifying new examples by similarity-based reasoning from this memory of examples. The approach is argued to be especially suited for natural language processing (NLP) because of the abundance of sub-regularities and exceptions in most NLP problems (Daelemans, van den Bosch, & Zavrel, 1999), and has been successfully applied to the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion problem before (Daelemans & van den Bosch, 1996). The algorithm used for this experiment is called IB1-IG. IB1-IG (Daelemans et al., 1997) extends the basic k-nn algorithm with information gain ratio (Quinlan, 1991) feature weighting. IB1-IG builds a database of instances during learning. During testing, the distance between a test item and each memory item is defined as the number of features for which they have a different value. IG (information gain ratio) weighting looks at each feature in isolation and measures how much information it contributes to the reduction of uncertainty about the correct class label. These measures are used as feature weights in computing the distance between items.

In Table 3, an overview is given of the generalisation accuracy using the IB1-IG algorithm on Celex and Fonilex. For Celex, a generalisation accuracy of 99.16% is reached at the phoneme level, and of 93.00% on the word level. For Fonilex, which has a more complex phonemic representation and in which word forms can have more than one phonemic transcription, percentages are lower: IB1-IG correctly classifies 98.18% of the phonemes and 86.37% of the words.

Apart from the spelling, we did not have additional information to further improve the generalization accuracy. Given that the classifiers for Flemish and Dutch are trying to learn very similar but nevertheless slightly different mappings, we investigate in the next subsection whether the predicted output of the one could help in making more accurate the predicted output of the other to further improve the accuracy of the grapheme-to-phoneme convertors.

### 3.2 Cascade and Classifier Combination

In this section, the experiments in which single classifiers are trained on Celex and Fonilex, respectively, are taken as the basis for various experiments, as displayed in Figure 1. Four different experiments are performed using this point of view. In all experiments, the IB1-IG algorithm, as described in 3.1, is used to perform the text-to-pronunciation mapping task.

* In (i) a single classifier is trained on one of both pronunciation variants; in a second step, the output of this process is used as input for training another classifier for the other variant.
* In (ii), the same information is used, but the spelling information, together with the predicted output of the classifier trained on the other variant in the experiment described in 3.1 is used as an input pattern for a second classifier.
* In (iii), spelling information together with the output of both classifiers described in Section 3.1., is given to train a classifier.

In Table 4, an overview is given of the generalisation accuracy of the different classifiers. The combination classifier which generates the highest percentage of generalisation errors is indicated in bold.

For both Celex and Fonilex, the experiment in which spelling and predicted output for both problems are combined in a meta-classifier yields the highest accuracy: 99.40% on the phoneme level for Celex and 98.89% for Fonilex, corresponding with 95.16% and 91.55% respectively at the word level. Interestingly, adding a classifier in the combination having learned a particular task (e.g. Flemish) can help boost performance on a different but similar task (Dutch).

### 3.3 Combining the Combination Classifiers

In this section we further explore the use of system combination in the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion task by combining combined classifiers, as displayed in Figure 2.

Four different meta-classifiers are used, viz. C5.O (described in Section 4), IB1-IG (described in 3.1), IGTREE (Daelemans, van den Bosch, & Weijters, 1997) and MACCENT.111Details on how to obtain Maccent can be found on: http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~ldh/ IGTREE is an optimised approximation of the instance-based learning algorithm IB1-IG. In IGTREE, the database of instances is compressed into a decision tree, consisting of paths of connected nodes ending in leaves which contain classification information. Information gain is used to determine the order in which the feature values are added as arcs to the tree. The last meta-classifier, MACCENT, is an implementation of maximum entropy modeling allowing symbolic features as input. The package takes care of the translation of symbolic values to binary feature vectors, and implements the iterative scaling approach to finding the probabilistic model.

The results of these four combination classifiers are used to train a so-called \`\`meta-meta-classifier'', for the training of which IB1-IG is used. The reasoning behind this experiment is that the same way a meta-classifier can overcome some of the errors of different \`\`object-classifiers'' learning a similar task, a \`\`meta-meta-classifier'' should be able to do the same for meta-classifiers. In these experiments, the combination classifiers are trained on spelling information together with the output of both object classifiers described in Section 3.1. The predictions of the four stacked classifiers are then fed to a new combination classifier.

In this section we reported research on the generation of a maximally accurate phonemic representation for both Dutch and Flemish reflecting the pronunciation of a given word on the basis of its orthographic representation. In order to obtain high accuracy automatic annotation, different approaches were used. These experiments showed that the memory-based learning algorithms performed well on the text-to-pronunciation mapping task. Training single classifiers on both variants of Dutch already resulted in generalisation accuracies of about 99% at the phoneme level for Celex and 98% for Fonilex (93% and 86% at the word level respectively). Making use of classifier combination with information predicted by a classifier for the other pronunciation variant led to further reductions of the error at the word level of about 31% for Celex and 38% for Fonilex to which meta-meta-learning added a limited but significant additional reduction (5%). The already high accuracy level for single classifiers is boosted significantly using combination of classifiers and combination of meta-learners. With this high level of accuracy, automatic phonemic conversion becomes an increasingly more useful annotation tool.

## 4 Rule Induction

Apart from being after high accuracy, we are also interested in insight into the linguistic regularities governing the differences between the two regional variants of Dutch. Using rule induction techniques, we investigate whether machine learning techniques reproduce the theoretical analysis of linguists, and whether rules can be induced that accurately translate one variant into the other.

### 4.1 Experiments

We first focus on the question whether it is possible to predict one variant on the basis of the phonemic representation of the other. Our starting point is the assumption that the differences in the phonemic transcriptions between Flemish and Dutch are highly systematic, and can be represented in a set of rules, which provide linguistic insight into the overlap and discrepancies between both variants. Moreover, they can be used to adapt pronunciation databases for Dutch automatically to Flemish and vice versa. In our experiment we used two rule induction techniques, viz. Transformation-based error-driven learning (TBEDL) (Brill, 1995), a learning method popular in NLP, and the well-known C5.0 (Quinlan, 1993).

In TBEDL, transformation rules are learned by comparing a corpus that is annotated by an initial-state annotator to a correctly annotated corpus, which is called the \`\`truth''. In this study, the Fonilex representation functions as \`\`truth'', and the Celex representation as initial-state annotation. The task is to learn how to transform Celex representations into Fonilex representations (i.e., translate Dutch pronunciation to Flemish pronunciation). Rule induction is greedy, is triggered by differences between the initial-state representations and the truth, and constrained by a number of user-defined patterns restricting the context. This learning process results in an ordered list of transformation rules which reflects the systematic differences between both representations. A rule is read as: \`\`change x (Celex) into y (Fonilex) in the following triggering environment''. E.g.,

| /i/ /I/ NEXT 1 OR 2 OR 3 PHON /e/ |
| --- |
| (change a tense /i/ to a lax /i/ when one of the |
| three following Celex phonemes is a tense /e/). |

C5.0, on the other hand, which is a commercial version of the C4.5 program, generates a classifier in the form of a decision tree. Since decision trees can be hard to read, the decision tree is converted to a set of production rules, which are more intelligible to the user. The rules have the form \`\`L -$`>`$ R'', in which the left-hand side is a conjunction of attribute-based tests and the right-hand side is a class. When classifying a case, the list of rules is examined to find the first rule whose left-hand side satisfies the case. In this experiment we have made use of a context of three phonemes preceding (indicated by f-1, f-2, and f-3) and following (f+1, f+2, f+3) the focus phoneme, which is indicated by an 'f'. The predicted class for this case is then the right-hand side of the rule. At the top of the rule the number of training cases covered by the rule is given together with the number of cases that do not belong to the class predicted by the rule. The \`\`lift'' is the estimated accuracy of the rule divided by the prior probability of the predicted class. E.g.,

| (6422/229, lift 79.0) |
| --- |
| f = i |
| f+1 in {m, b, t, r, k, N, G, f, n, v, h, d, l, p, |
| s, z, S, (…)} |
| -$`>`$ class I \[0.964\] |

In TBEDL, the complete training set of 90% was used for learning the transformation rules. A threshold of 15 errors was specified, which means that learning stops if the error reduction lies under that threshold. For the C5.0 experiment, 50% (796,841 cases) of the original training set served as training set (more training data was computationally not feasible on our hardware). A decision tree model and a production rule model were built from the training cases. The tree gave rise to 671 rules, which were applied to the original 10% test set we used in the Brill experiment. In order to make the type of task comparable for the transformation based approach used by TBEDL, in the classification-based approach used in C5.0, the output class to be predicted by C5.0 was either \`0' when the Celex and Fonilex phoneme are identical (i.e. no change), or the Fonilex phoneme when Celex and Fonilex differ (mimicking a transformation approach).

Table 6 gives an overview of the overlap between Celex and Fonilex after application of both rule induction techniques. A comparison of these results shows that, when evaluating both TBEDL and C5.0 on the test set, the transformation rules learned by the Brill-tagger have a higher error rate, even when C5.0 is only trained on half the data used by TBEDL. On the word level, the initial overlap of 55.25% is raised to 83.01% after application of the 430 transformation rules, and to 85.93% when using the C5.0 rules. On the phoneme level, the 92.20% of the initial overlap is increased to 97.74% (TBEDL) and 98.14% (C5.0). A closer analysis of the rules produced during TBEDL reveals that the first 50 rules lead to a considerable increase of performance from 55.25% to 76.19% on the word level and from 92.20% to 96.62% on the phoneme level, which indicates the high applicability of these rules. Afterwards, the increase of accuracy is more gradual: from 76.19% to 83.01% (words) and from 96.62% to 97.74% (phonemes).

When looking only at those cases where Celex and Fonilex differ, we see that it is possible to learn transformation rules which predict 62.0% of the differences at the word level and 71.0% of the differences at the phoneme level. The C5.0 rules are more or less 5-7% more accurate: 68.6% (words) and 76.2% (phonemes). It is indeed possible to reliably \`translate' Dutch into Flemish. These results, however, are below the results generated in the preceding experiment where there is a direct transition from spelling to Fonilex and from spelling to Celex. The rule-induction process described above requires a first component which does the transition from spelling to the phonemic Celex transcription. In order to obtain a Fonilex transcription, the rules generated by TBEDL or C5.0 are applied to the output of the first component.

### 4.2 Linguistic Regularities

In this section we will discuss some example rules generated for consonants and vowels. Starting point is the first ten rules that were learned during TBEDL, which will be compared with the ten C5.0 rules, which most reduce the error rate.

#### 4.2.1 Consonants

Nearly half of the differences on the consonant level concerns the alternation between voiced and unvoiced consonants. In this group, the alternation between /x/ and /G/ is the most frequent one. In the word \`\`gelijkaardig'' (Eng.: \`\`equal''), for example, we find a /xlEikardx/ with a voiceless velar fricative in Dutch and /GlEikardx/ with a voiced velar fricative in Flemish. The word \`\`machiavellisme'' (Eng.: \`\`Machiavellism'') is pronounced as /mAGijavElIsm/ in Dutch and as /mAkIjAvElIzm/ in Flemish.

This alternation also is the subject of the first transformation rule that was learned, namely \`\`x G PREV 1 OR 2 PHON STAART'' which can be read as \`\`/x/ changes into /G/ in case of a word beginning one or two positions before''. When looking at the ten most important C5.0 rules, this alternation is described in:

| (6814/27, lift 109.5) |
| --- |
| f-1 in {=, E} |
| f = x |
| -$`>`$ class G \[0.996\] |

Another important phenomenon is the use of palatalisation in Flemish, as in the word \`\`aaitje'' (Eng.: \`\`stroke''), where Fonilex uses the palatalized form /ajtS/ instead of /ajtj/. This change is also described by both top ten Brill and C5.0 rules.

#### 4.2.2 Vowels

The most frequent difference at the vowel level between Dutch and Flemish concerns the use of a lax vowel instead of a tense vowel for the /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/ and /u/. Tense Celex-vowels not only correspond with tense, but also with lax vowels in Fonilex. Other less frequent differences are glide insertion, e.g. in \`\`geshaket'' and the use of schwa instead of another vowel, as in \`\`teleprocessing'' in Flemish.

Five out of the first ten transformation rules indicate a transition from a tense vowel into a lax vowel in a certain triggering environment. A closer look at the top ten C5.0 production rules shows that seven rules describe this transition from a Celex tense vowel to a Fonilex lax vowel. An example is the word \`\`multipliceer'' (Eng.: \`\`multiply'') which is transcribed as /mltipliser/ in Celex and as /mltIplIser/ in Fonilex. The change of the second /i/ into a /I/ is described in the following transformation rule: \`\`/i/ changes into /I/ if the NEXT 1 OR 2 OR 3 PHON is an /e/. The corresponding C5.0 rule describing this phenomenon is the following:

| (7758/623, lift 75.4) |
| --- |
| f = i |
| f+1 in {m, b, t, k, G, f, n, v, d, p, s, , g} |
| f+2 in {m, O, t, r, k, y, A, f, i, e, n, (…)} |
| -$`>`$ class I \[0.920\] |

These rules, describing the differences between Dutch and Flemish consonants and vowels also make linguistic sense. Linguistic literature, such as (Booij, 1995) indicates tendencies such as voicing and devoicing on the consonant level and the confusion of tense and lax vowels as important differences between Dutch and Flemish. The same discrepancies are found in the transcriptions made by Flemish subjects in the Dutch transcription experiments described in Gillis (1999).

## 5 Conclusion and Future Work

The development of accurate and understandable annotation tools is of prime importance in current Natural Language Processing research, which is based to a large extent on the development of reliable corpora. We discussed the task of phonemic annotation in such a large-scale corpus development project. We were able to show that for this text-to-pronunciation task, machine learning techniques provide an excellent approach to bootstrapping the annotation and modeling the linguistic knowledge involved. We do not know of any approach based on hand-crafting with similar or better accuracy for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for Dutch.

We were both interested in optimal accuracy and in obtaining increased insight into the linguistic regularities involved. We have empirically examined whether combination of different systems (in this case classifiers trained on different variants of Dutch) enables us to raise the performance ceiling which can be observed when using data driven systems. A comparison of the results of training single classifiers and the use of a meta-classifier indeed indicates a significant decrease in error of 31% Dutch and 38% for Flemish. Going one step further, namely combining the combination classifiers results in an additional error decrease of 5% for both Flemish and Dutch.

The use of rule induction techniques to predict one variant on the basis of the phonemic transcription of the other variant, on the other hand, generates more generalisation errors. However, This rule induction process leads to an increased insight into the systematic differences between both variants of Dutch.

In the text-to-pronunciation task, described in this study, disambiguation in context is required, which is also the case for other problems in language processing, such as tagging and chunking. Therefore, we plan to explore whether combining classifiers and combining combined classifiers can lead to accuracy boosts for these other NLP problems as well. We will also investigate other methods that have proved to be promising combination methods for our task (e.g. Naive Bayes). A possible limitation of the current approach may be that different tasks can only be combined when they are very similar (in this case pronunciation prediction of two related dialects), a situation which may be rare.

## Acknowledgements

This research is partially supported by the \`\`Linguaduct'' project (FWO Flanders, G.0157.97), and the project \`\`Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN)'' (Dutch Organization for Scientific Research NWO and the Flemish Government).

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# Color-singlet direct 𝐽/𝜓 and 𝜓' production at Tevatron in the 𝑘_𝑡 factorization approach

## Abstract

Direct $`J/\psi `$ and $`\psi ^{}`$ production rates at Tevatron are calculated in the $`k_t`$-factorization approach within the color-singlet model. In this approach, the production rates are enhanced by a factor of 20 compared to the naive collinear parton model. However, the theoretical predictions are still below the experimental data by at least one order of magnitude. This means that to explain charmonium productions at Tevatron, we still need to call for the contributions from color-octet channels or other production mechanisms.

Studies of heavy quarkonium production in high energy collisions provide important information on both perturbative and nonperturbative QCD. In recent years, heavy quarkonium production has attracted much attention from both theory and experiment. To explain the $`J/\psi `$ and $`\psi ^{}`$ surplus problem of large transverse momentum production at Tevatron, the color-octet production mechanism was introduced for the description of heavy quarkonium production based on the NRQCD factorization framework. During the last few years, extensive studies have been performed for the test of this color-octet production mechanism. However, it was announced recently that the color-octet contributions to charmonia productions at Tevatron are excluded by the experimental data under the $`k_t`$-factorization approach, where the authors calculated $`\chi _{cJ}`$ production rates and found that the experimental data are successfully described only by the color-singlet contributions. Consequently, an urgent problem arises, which is whether the direct $`J/\psi `$ and $`\psi ^{}`$ productions can also be described only by the color-singlet contributions in the $`k_t`$ factorization approach. In this paper, we will try to tackle this problem. We will calculate the color-singlet direct $`J/\psi `$ and $`\psi ^{}`$ production in the $`k_t`$ factorization approach. We find the production rates are enhanced by a factor of about 20 compared to the conventional collinear parton model predictions after considering the $`k_t`$ effects of the incident partons. However, the theoretical predictions are still below the experimental data by at least one order of magnitude. Therefore, to explain the Tevatron data on large transverse momentum charmonium productions, we still need to call for color-octet contributions or other production mechanisms.

The $`k_t`$-factorization approach differs greatly from the conventional collinear approximation because it takes the non-vanishing transverse momenta of the scattering partons into account. The conventional gluon densities are replaced by unintegrated gluon distributions which depend on the transverse momentum $`k_t`$.

The lowest order graphs for heavy quark pair production in $`k_t`$ factorization approach are plotted in Fig. 1, where we just give the typical graphs of . The first two types of graphs (a) and (b) are conventional ones for the gluon-gluon fusion processes. The third type of graphs (c) are needed to preserve gauge invariance. To calculate heavy quarkonium production in this approach, we must project the $`Q\overline{Q}`$ pair into a particular bound state. Because the $`Q\overline{Q}`$ pairs in (b) and (c) are in color-octet, these two types of graphs will not contribute to heavy quarkonium production within the color-singlet model. In fact in , the productions of color-singlet $`P`$-wave charmonium states $`\chi _{cJ}`$ are calculated, where there are only type (a) graphs contributing to their productions.

For the spin-triplet $`S`$-wave charmonium states $`J/\psi `$ and $`\psi ^{}`$, in the lowest order, even type (a) graphs of Fig. 1 can not contribute to their productions because of $`C`$ (charge) parity conservation. So, to produce the spin-triplet color-singlet $`S`$-wave heavy quarkonium states, one must go to higher order (in terms of $`\alpha _s`$) processes where an additional gluon must be emitted out. That is to say, in the lowest order, the spin-triplet $`S`$-wave quarkonia are only produced in the $`Q\overline{Q}g`$ production processes. In Fig. 2, we give the typical graphs for $`Q\overline{Q}g`$ production in the $`k_t`$-factorization approach, which include all contributing graphs in this order calculations in a gauge invariant formalism. However, among these graphs only type (a) graphs of Fig. 2 contribute to $`S`$-wave quarkonium productions, because other graphs violate $`C`$ parity or color conservations.

To calculate the production amplitude given by the type (a) graphs of Fig. 2, we make a Sudakov decomposition for every 4-momenta $`k_i`$ as

$$k_i=\alpha _ip_1+\beta _ip_2+\stackrel{}{k}_{iT},$$
(1)
where $`p_1`$ and $`p_2`$ are the momenta of the incoming hadrons. In the high energy limit, we have $`p_1^2=0`$, $`p_2^2=0`$, and $`2p_1p_2=s`$, where $`s`$ is the c.m. energy squared. $`\alpha _i`$ and $`\beta _i`$ are the momentum fractions of $`p_1`$ and $`p_2`$ respectively. $`k_{iT}`$ is the transverse momentum, which satisfies

$$k_{iT}p_1=0,k_{iT}p_2=0.$$
(2)
For the momenta of the incident gluons $`q_1`$ and $`q_2`$, we have the following decomposition,

$$q_1=x_1p_1+q_{1T},q_2=x_2p_2+q_{2T}.$$
(3)
That is to say, the longitudinal component of $`q_1`$ ($`q_2`$) is only in the direction of light-like vector $`p_1`$ ($`p_2`$).

Using the above defined Sudakov variables, we can express the cross section for $`J/\psi `$ production from the type (a) graphs of Fig. 2 in the following form,

$$d\sigma (p\overline{p}J/\psi X)=\frac{1}{64\times 16(2\pi )^4}\frac{d\alpha _\psi }{\alpha _\psi }\frac{d\alpha _3}{\alpha _3}d^2p_Td^2q_{1T}d^2q_{2T}\frac{f(x_1;q_{1T}^2)}{q_{1T}^2}\frac{f(x_2;q_{2T}^2)}{q_{2T}^2}\frac{|A_0(q_{1T},q_{2T}|^2}{q_{1T}^2q_{2T}^2},$$
(4)
where $`p_T`$ is the transverse momentum of $`J/\psi `$, $`\alpha _\psi `$ and $`\alpha _3`$ are the momenta fractions of $`p_1`$ carried by $`J/\psi `$ and the outgoing gluon. The amplitude $`A_0`$ describes $`J/\psi `$ production in the gluon-gluon fusion processes $`g+gJ/\psi +g`$, with the off-shellness of the two incident gluons being $`q_1^2=q_{1T}^2`$ and $`q_2^2=q_{2T}^2`$ respectively. We have checked that the amplitude $`A_0`$ vanishes when $`q_{1T}0`$ or $`q_{2T}0`$, which is required by the gauge invariance of this approach.

$`f(x;q_T^2)`$ is the unintegrated gluon distribution, which is related to the conventional gluon distribution by

$$xg(x,\mu ^2)=^{\mu ^2}\frac{dk_T^2}{k_T^2}f(x;k_T^2).$$
(5)
The unintegrated gluon distribution $`f(x;q_T^2)`$ includes the evolution in $`x`$ and $`k_T^2`$ by the BFKL and DGLAP equations. In the nonperturbative region of small $`k_T^2`$ the unintegrated gluon distribution is not known, so in practice the above equation may be rewritten as

$$xg(x,\mu ^2)=xg(x,q_0^2)+_{q_0^2}^{\mu ^2}\frac{dk_T^2}{k_T^2}f(x;k_T^2),$$
(6)
which introduces a priori unknown initial scale $`q_0^2`$ and the initial gluon distribution $`xg(x,q_0^2)`$. According to this procedure, the amplitude has the following decomposition form,

$`S(q_{1T},q_{2T})`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{|A_0(q_{1T},q_{2T})|^2}{q_{1T}^2q_{2T}^2}}`$ (7)
$`=`$ $`S(0,0)\theta (q_0^2q_{1T}^2)\theta (q_0^2q_{2T}^2)+S(q_{1T},0)\theta (q_{1T}^2q_0^2)\theta (q_0^2q_{2T}^2)`$ (8)
$`+`$ $`S(0,q_{2T})\theta (q_0^2q_{1T}^2)\theta (q_{2T}^2q_0^2)+S(q_{1T},q_{2T})\theta (q_{1T}^2q_0^2)\theta (q_{2T}^2q_0^2).`$ (9)
The function $`S`$ here is similar to the function $`I`$ of  called the impact factor, which is, in effect, an off-shell but gauge invariant cross section. We note that $`S(0,0)`$ represents the cross section for gluon-gluon fusion processes with no $`k_t`$ effects associated with the two incident gluons. Substituting this part of $`S`$ into Eq. (4), we can reproduce the conventional collinear parton model results for $`S`$-wave quarkonium production.

For numerical calculations, we choose the unintegrated gluon distribution of , where the authors determined it by using a combination of DGLAP and BFKL equations. With the initial conditions

$$q_0^2=1GeV^2,xg(x,q_0^2)=1.57(1x)^{2.5},$$

they obtained an excellent fit to $`F_2(x,Q^2)`$ data over a wide range of $`x`$ and $`Q^2`$. As in Refs., we set the scales $`\mu ^2`$ for strong coupling constant $`\alpha _s(\mu ^2)`$ in the amplitude squared $`|A_0|^2`$ to be $`q_{1T}^2`$ for the interaction vertex associated with the incident gluon $`q_1`$, $`q_{2T}^2`$ for the vertex associated with $`q_2`$, and $`p_T^2+m^2`$ ($`m=2m_c`$ is the quarkonium mass) for the vertex associated with the outgoing gluon attached to the $`c\overline{c}`$ line.

In the following we present the numerical results for color-singlet direct $`S`$-wave charmonia productions at Tevatron, compared with the experimental data. Fig. 3 is for $`J/\psi `$, and Fig. 4 is for $`\psi ^{}`$. In the calculations, we use charm quark mass as $`m_c=1.5GeV`$, and the color-singlet matrix elements as $`𝒪_1^\psi ({}_{}{}^{3}S_{1}^{})=1.08GeV^3`$, and $`𝒪_1^\psi ^{}({}_{}{}^{3}S_{1}^{})=0.67GeV^3`$. To compare with the experimental data we have imposed a cut on the rapidity of $`J/\psi `$ and $`\psi ^{}`$: $`|\eta |<0.6`$. From these two figures, we can see that the production rates are enhanced by a factor of about 20 compared to the conventional collinear parton model predictions after considering the $`k_t`$ effects of the incident gluons. However, the theoretical predictions are still below the experimental data by at least one order of magnitude. Therefore, to explain the Tevatron data on large transverse momentum charmonium productions, we still need to call for color-octet contributions or other production mechanisms.

In conclusion, we have calculated direct $`J/\psi `$ and $`\psi ^{}`$ production at Tevatron in $`k_t`$-factorization approach within the color-singlet model. We found that the production rates are enhanced by a factor of 20 compared to the conventional collinear parton model. However, the theoretical predictions are still below the experimental data by at least one order of magnitude. This means that to explain charmonium productions at Tevatron, we still need to call for the contributions from color-octet channels or other production mechanisms.

###### Acknowledgements.

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the State Education Commission of China, and the State Commission of Science and Technology of China.
Figure Captions

FIG. 1. The typical graphs for $`Q\overline{Q}`$ production in $`k_t`$ factorization approach in gauge invariant formalism.

FIG. 2. The typical graphs for $`Q\overline{Q}g`$ production in $`k_t`$ factorization approach in gauge invariant formalism.

FIG. 3. The color-singlet predictions for large $`p_T`$ direct $`J/\psi `$ production compared with the experimental data from Tevatron. The dashed line denotes the result in the conventional collinear parton model, and the solid line is the result in the $`k_t`$ factorization approach.

FIG. 4. The same as Fig. 3 but for $`\psi ^{}`$.


text:
# The Weak OPE and Dimension-eight Operators

## 1 Motivation

### 1.1 Calculating Kaon Weak Amplitudes

The modern approach to calculating a kaon weak nonleptonic amplitude $``$ involves use of the operator product expansion,

$$=\underset{d}{}\underset{i}{}𝒞_i^{(d)}(\mu )𝒬_i^{(d)}_\mu ,$$
(1)
in which the nonleptonic weak hamiltonian $`_\mathrm{W}`$ is expressed as a linear combination of local operators $`𝒬_i^{(d)}`$. There is a sum over the dimensions (starting here at $`d=6`$) of the local operators and a sum over all operators of a common dimension. In practice, the following hybrid methodology is employed:

1. The Wilson coefficients $`𝒞_i^{(d)}(\mu )`$ are calculated in $`\overline{MS}`$ renormalization.
2. The operator matrix elements $`𝒬_i^{(d)}_\mu `$ are calculated in cutoff renormalization at the energy scale $`\mu `$. The term ‘cutoff’ means specifically that $`\mu `$ serves as a ‘separation scale’ which distinguishes between short-distance and long-distance physics. Three different approaches falling into this category are quark models, $`1/N_c`$ expansion methods, and lattice-QCD evaluations.111A list of references is given elsewhere.

The reason for this hybrid approach is that it is not practical to carry out the (low energy) kaon matrix element evaluations with $`\overline{MS}`$ renormalization. Typical choices for the scale $`\mu `$ fall in the range $`0.5\mu (\mathrm{GeV})3`$, the lower part used in quark-model and $`1/N_c`$ evaluations and the upper part in lattice simulations.

The purpose of this talk is to describe some recent results:

1. In a pure cutoff scheme, dimension-eight operators occur in the weak hamiltonian at order $`G_F\alpha _s/\mu ^2`$, $`\mu `$ being the separation scale. This can be explicitly demonstrated (see Sect. 2) in a calculation involving a LR weak hamiltonian.
2. In dimensional regularization (DR), the $`d=8`$ operators do not appear explicitly in the hamiltonian at order $`G_F\alpha _s`$. However, the use of a cutoff scheme for the calculation of the matrix elements of dimension-six operators requires a careful matching onto DR for which dimension-eight operators do play an important role.

These findings mean that hybrid evaluations, in the sense described above, of kaon matrix elements at low $`\mu `$ will contain (unwanted) contributions from dimension-eight operators. At the very least, this will introduce an uncertainty of unknown magnitude into the evaluation.

## 2 Cutoff Renormalization

### 2.1 $`ϵ^{}/ϵ`$ in the Chiral Limit

The determination of $`ϵ^{}/ϵ`$ can be shown to depend upon the matrix elements $`(\pi \pi )_0|𝒬_6^{(6)}|K`$ and $`(\pi \pi )_2|𝒬_8^{(6)}|K`$. In the chiral limit of vanishing light-quark mass, the latter matrix element (as well as that of operator $`𝒬_7^{(6)}`$) can be inferred from certain vacuum expectation values, $`0|𝒪_{1,8}^{(6)}|0𝒪_{1,8}^{(6)}`$, where $`𝒪_{1,8}^{(6)}`$ are dimension-six four-quark operators. The use of soft-meson techniques to relate physical amplitudes to those in the world of zero light-quark mass is a well-known procedure of chiral dynamics.

### 2.2 Sum Rules for $`𝒪_{1,8}^{(6)}`$

Numerical values for $`𝒪_{1,8}^{(6)}`$ in cutoff renormalization can be obtained from the following sum rules,

$`{\displaystyle \frac{16\pi ^2}{3}}𝒪_1^{(6)}_\mu ^{(\mathrm{c}.\mathrm{o}.)}={\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑ss^2\mathrm{ln}{\displaystyle \frac{s+\mu ^2}{s}}\mathrm{\Delta }\rho `$
$`2\pi \alpha _s𝒪_8^{(6)}_\mu ^{(\mathrm{c}.\mathrm{o}.)}={\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑ss^2{\displaystyle \frac{\mu ^2}{s+\mu ^2}}\mathrm{\Delta }\rho ,`$
(2)
where $`\mathrm{\Delta }\rho (s)`$ is the difference of vector and axialvector spectral functions, and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Pi }(Q^2)`$ is the corresponding difference of isospin polarization functions ($`m\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Pi }=\pi \mathrm{\Delta }\rho `$).

### 2.3 Physics of a LR Operator

One can probe the influence of $`d=8`$ operators by considering the K-to-$`\pi `$ matrix element $`(p)`$,

$`(p)`$ $`=`$ $`\pi ^{}(p)|_{\mathrm{LR}}|K^{}(p),`$ (3)
where $`_{\mathrm{LR}}`$ is a LR hamiltonian obtained by flipping the chirality of one of the quark pairs in the usual LL hamiltonian $`_\mathrm{W}`$. The reason for defining such a LR operator is that, in leading chiral order, its K-to-$`\pi `$ matrix element is nonzero and yields information on $`𝒪_1^{(6)}`$ and $`𝒪_8^{(6)}`$.

To demonstrate this, we proceed to the chiral limit to find

$`(0)=\underset{\mathrm{p}=0}{lim}(p)`$
$`={\displaystyle \frac{3G_FM_W^2}{32\sqrt{2}\pi ^2F_\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑Q^2{\displaystyle \frac{Q^4}{Q^2+M_W^2}}\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Pi }.`$
(4)
This result is exact — it is not a consequence of any model. Information about $`𝒪_1^{(6)}`$ and $`𝒪_8^{(6)}`$ is obtained by performing an operator product expansion on $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Pi }(Q^2)`$. Working to first order in $`\alpha _s`$ we have

$`={\displaystyle \frac{G_F}{2\sqrt{2}F_\pi ^2}}[𝒪_1^{(6)}_\mu ^{(\mathrm{c}.\mathrm{o}.)}`$
$`+{\displaystyle \frac{3}{8\pi }}\mathrm{ln}{\displaystyle \frac{M_W^2}{\mu ^2}}\alpha _s𝒪_8^{(6)}_\mu +{\displaystyle \frac{3}{16\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle \frac{_\mu ^{(8)}}{\mu ^2}}+\mathrm{}]`$
(5)
The three additive terms in Eq. (5) are proportional respectively to the quantities $`𝒪_1^{(6)}`$, $`𝒪_8^{(6)}`$ and $`^{(8)}`$. The last of these ($`^{(8)}`$) contains the effect of the $`d=8`$ contributions.222Although the $`d=8`$ LL operators arising from $`𝒬_2^{(6)}`$ have been determined, to our knowledge the individual $`d=8`$ LR operators comprising $`^{(8)}`$ have not. For dimensional reasons, $`^{(8)}`$ must be accompanied by an inverse squared energy. This turns out to be the factor $`\mu ^2`$.

In Table 1 we display the numerical values (in units of $`10^7\mathrm{GeV}^2`$) of the three terms of Eq. (5) for various choices of $`\mu `$. Observe for the lowest values that the dimension-eight term dominates the contribution from $`𝒪_1^{(6)}`$. Only when one proceeds to a sufficiently large value like $`\mu =4`$ GeV is the $`d=8`$ influence suppressed.

## 3 Dimensional Regularization

Suppose one wishes to express the entire analysis in terms of $`\overline{MS}`$ quantities. To do so requires converting matrix elements in cutoff renormalization to those in $`\overline{MS}`$ renormalization. Recall, in dimensional regularization one calculates in $`d`$ dimensions and for dimensional consistency introduces a scale $`\mu _{\mathrm{d}.\mathrm{r}.}`$.

The dimensionally regularized matrix element for $`𝒪_1^{(6)}`$ is found from the $`d`$-dimensional integral,

$`𝒪_1^{(6)}_\mu ^{(\mathrm{d}.\mathrm{r}.)}=𝒪_1^{(6)}_\mu ^{(\mathrm{c}.\mathrm{o}.)}`$
$`+{\displaystyle \frac{d1}{(4\pi )^{d/2}}}{\displaystyle \frac{\mu _{\mathrm{d}.\mathrm{r}.}^{4d}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(d/2\right)}}{\displaystyle _{\mu ^2}^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑Q^2Q^d\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Pi }(Q^2).`$ (6)
The term in Eq. (6) containing the integral is proof that the dimensionally regularized matrix element $`𝒪_1^{(6)}_\mu ^{(\mathrm{d}.\mathrm{r}.)}`$ will contain short-distance contributions. As written, this term becomes divergent for four dimensions and also is scheme-dependent. In the $`\overline{\mathrm{MS}}`$ approach, the divergent factor $`2/ϵ\gamma +\mathrm{ln}(4\pi )`$ is removed. The NDR scheme involves a certain procedure for treating chirality in $`d`$-dimensions. The final result is a relation (given here to $`𝒪(\alpha _s)`$) between the cutoff and $`\overline{\mathrm{MS}}`$-NDR matrix elements,

$`𝒪_1^{(6)}_\mu ^{(\overline{\mathrm{MS}}\mathrm{NDR})}=𝒪_1^{(6)}_\mu ^{(\mathrm{c}.\mathrm{o}.)}`$
$`+{\displaystyle \frac{3}{8\pi }}\left[\mathrm{ln}{\displaystyle \frac{\mu _{\mathrm{d}.\mathrm{r}.}^2}{\mu ^2}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{6}}\right]\alpha _s𝒪_8^{(6)}_\mu `$
$`+{\displaystyle \frac{3}{16\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle \frac{_\mu ^{(8)}}{\mu ^2}}+\mathrm{}`$ (7)
The effect of the $`d=8`$ contribution to the weak OPE now appears in the $`d=6`$ $`\overline{\mathrm{MS}}`$-NDR operator matrix element. Note also that the parameter $`\mu _{\mathrm{d}.\mathrm{r}.}`$ is distinct from the separation scale $`\mu `$.

## 4 Evaluation of $`B_{7,8}^{(3/2)}`$

To suppress the effect of dimension-eight operators on the determinations of Eq. (2), one should evaluate the two sum rules for $`𝒪_{1,8}_\mu ^{(\mathrm{c}.\mathrm{o}.)}`$ at a large value of $`\mu `$ (e.g. $`\mu 4`$ GeV) and then use renormalization group equations to run the matrix elements down to lower values of $`\mu `$ (e.g. $`\mu =2`$ GeV). Alternative approaches might involve the finite energy sum rule framework or QCD-lattice simulations at sufficiently large $`\mu `$.

## 5 Concluding Remarks

This talk has dealt with an important aspect of calculating kaon weak matrix elements, the role of dimension-eight operators. In this regard, Eq. (7) is of special interest. It reveals that the relation between $`\overline{\mathrm{MS}}`$-NDR and cutoff matrix elements will involve not only mixing between operators of a given dimension but also mixing between operators of differing dimensions. The net result of our work is that existing work on $`ϵ^{}/ϵ`$ will be affected, especially for methods which take $`\mu 2`$ GeV.

## Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.


text:
# Production of 𝜂′ Mesons in the 𝑝𝑝→𝑝𝑝𝜂′ Reaction at 3.67 GeV/c

## Abstract

The ratio of the total exclusive production cross sections for $`\eta `$ and $`\eta `$ mesons has been measured in the $`pp`$ reaction at $`p_{beam}=3.67`$ GeV/c. The observed $`\eta /\eta `$ ratio is $`(0.83\pm 0.11_{0.18}^{+0.23})\times 10^2`$ from which the exclusive $`\eta `$ meson production cross section is determined to be $`(1.12\pm 0.15_{0.31}^{+0.42})\mu b`$. Differential cross section distributions have been measured. Their shape is consistent with isotropic $`\eta `$ meson production.

thanks: current address: Brokat Infosystems AG - Stuttgartthanks: current address: LPNHE X, Ecole Polytechnique Palaiseauthanks: current address: Temple University, Philadelphiathanks: current address: FZ-Rossendorfthanks: current address: IU School of Medicine - Indianapolisthanks: deceasedthanks: current address: Motorola Polska Software Center - Kraków

The study of the $`\eta `$ meson production is of particular interest because of its large mass compared to the other members of the ground state pseudoscalar meson nonet. The spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry causes the existence of massless Goldstone bosons, which acquire mass due to explicit chiral symmetry breaking, and are associated with the pseudoscalar meson nonet. In addition quantization effects in QCD lead to the so-called $`U_A(1)`$ anomaly, which allows the $`\eta `$ meson to gain mass by a different mechanism than the Goldstone bosons . Nevertheless, the origin of the $`\eta `$ mass and its structure in terms of quark and gluon degrees of freedom remain controversial.

Recent measurements of the $`\eta `$ meson by the CLEO collaboration show an anomalously large branching ratio of B-mesons to $`\eta X`$ and $`\eta K`$ , which might indicate a strong coupling of the $`\eta `$ meson to gluons . Furthermore, the quark component of the nucleon’s axial-vector matrix element measured in the EMC experiment  suggests that the $`\eta `$ meson couples very weakly to the nucleon .

First measurements  of the reaction $`pppp\eta `$ near the production threshold provide the possibility to determine the coupling constant $`g_{\eta NN}`$. However, a quantitative evaluation of this coupling constant requires answers to several open questions concerning the production mechanism, such as the roles of (i) meson-exchange currents, (ii) baryon resonances in the production mechanism (comparable with the role of the $`N^{}(1535)`$ for $`\eta `$ meson production ), and (iii) final-state interactions (FSI).

The existing data close to threshold are consistent with different one-boson-exchange models (OBE) including FSI  given the ambiguities in the treatment of heavy-meson-exchange currents. Evaluation of the different models requires a consistent description over a wide energy range, but data have been lacking at higher energies, where identification of the $`\eta `$ production can no longer be made solely by detecting two protons in a small forward cone .

In this letter, we report on a measurement of the $`\eta /\eta `$ production cross section ratio at an energy where proton-proton ($`pp`$) FSI have a much smaller relative influence on the production mechanism  compared to the near to threshold data . In addition, we show the differential cross sections of the $`\eta `$ meson as a function of the polar angle in the CM (center of mass) reference frame and the momentum distributions of the final state particles. These distributions are related to the partial wave contribution in the exit channel ($`pp\eta `$).

We studied the $`pp`$ reaction at the SATURNE II accelerator facility at Saclay. The proton beam of momentum $`3.67`$ GeV/c was incident on a liquid hydrogen target and charged products were detected using the DISTO spectrometer, which is described in detail elsewhere . This spectrometer consisted of a large dipole magnet ($`40`$ cm gap size, operating at $`1.0`$ Tm) which covered the target area and two sets of scintillating fiber hodoscopes. Outside the magnetic field, two sets of multi-wire proportional chambers (MWPC) were mounted, along with segmented plastic scintillator hodoscopes and water Čerenkov detectors. The scintillator hodoscopes and the Čerenkov detectors allow particle identification by combining either the energy loss, time of flight or Čerenkov light output with the particle momentum.

The large acceptance of all detectors ($`2^{}`$ to $`48^{}`$ horizontally and $`\pm 15^{}`$ vertically), on both sides of the beam, facilitated the coincident measurement of four charged particles, which was crucial for the reconstruction of many exclusive channels like $`ppK^+K^{}`$ , $`pp\pi ^+\pi ^{}\pi ^0`$, $`pK\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ and $`pK\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ .

The multi-particle trigger , which was based on the multiplicity of the hodoscope elements and the scintillating fibers, selected events with at least three charged tracks in the final state. The results presented in this work are based on $`4.2\times 10^7`$ reconstructed events with four charged particles (mainly $`pp\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$) detected.

The exclusive $`\eta `$ meson production ($`pppp\eta `$) was identified via its dominant decay channel involving charged particles ($`\pi ^+\pi ^{}\pi ^0`$, branching ratio 23.1%) and the reaction $`pppp\eta `$ was reconstructed via the decay of the $`\eta `$ meson into $`\pi ^+\pi ^{}\eta `$ (branching ratio 43.8%). The selection of the exclusive $`\eta `$ and $`\eta `$ meson production is based on two kinematical observables, the 4-particle ($`pp\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$) missing mass ($`M_{miss}^{4p}`$) and the proton-proton missing mass ($`M_{miss}^{pp}`$). Furthermore the light output from the Čerenkov detectors together with the particle momentum were used to discriminate between $`\pi ^+`$ mesons and protons in the final state.

Since neutral pions were not detected ($`\pi ^0\gamma \gamma `$, branching ratio 98.8%), $`pp\eta `$ events were selected in which $`M_{miss}^{4p}`$ was approximately consistent with a missing $`\pi ^0`$ meson ($`0.005\text{GeV}^2/\text{c}^4<\left(M_{miss}^{4p}\right)^2<0.035\text{GeV}^2/\text{c}^4`$). After imposing this constraint the proton-proton missing mass distribution is shown in Fig. 1 (upper frame). A broad signal from the $`\eta `$ meson is visible near $`M_{miss}^{4p}0.3\text{GeV}^2/\text{c}^4`$.

The assumption of a missing $`\pi ^0`$ meson allowed a constraint ($`(M_{miss}^{4p})^2=M_{\pi ^0}^2`$) to be imposed in order to improve the $`(M_{miss}^{pp})^2`$ mass resolution by a kinematical refit procedure. In this procedure all particle momenta were simultaneous re-determined under the assumption of a missing $`\pi ^0`$ meson. After applying the refit procedure, the resolution of the $`\eta `$ meson signal in the $`(M_{miss}^{pp})^2`$ distribution is improved by about a factor 2 (see Fig. 1, lower frame).

In both frames the solid curve shows the sum of the signal (dotted curve) and the background (dashed curve). The signal line shape was taken from detailed Monte Carlo simulations of the detector performance and the yield was determined by scaling the line shape to match the data using a $`\chi ^2`$ minimization procedure. The small deviations at $`(M_{miss}^{pp})^20.325\text{GeV}^2/\text{c}^4`$ result from imperfections of the modeling of the detector response and are included in the estimation of the systematic errors.

The non-resonant reaction $`pppp\pi ^+\pi ^{}\pi ^0`$ accounts for most of the background under the $`\eta `$ meson signal. Since the exact shape of the background is not quantitatively known, the background has been parameterized with a $`3^{rd}`$ order polynomial, that provides the best $`\chi ^2`$ to the fit.

The reconstruction of the decay channel $`pppp\eta pp\pi ^+\pi ^{}\eta `$ is analogous to the $`\eta `$ meson reconstruction described above, since the $`\eta `$ meson decays mostly by neutral modes (branching ratio 71.5%).

For this decay channel $`M_{miss}^{pp}`$ and $`M_{miss}^{4p}`$ must correspond to a missing $`\eta `$ and a missing $`\eta `$, respectively. The $`(M_{miss}^{pp})^2`$ distribution for events with a 4-particle missing mass consistent with a missing $`\eta `$ meson (i.e. $`\left|(M_{miss}^{4p})^2M_\eta ^2\right|<0.03\text{GeV}^2/\text{c}^4`$ ) is shown in Fig. 2 before (hatched area) and after (data points) the kinematical refit procedure with the constraint $`M_{miss}^{4p}=M_\eta `$. The spectrum after the refit shows a clear signal from the $`\eta `$ meson near $`M_\eta ^20.92\text{GeV}^2/\text{c}^4`$. In comparison to the reconstruction of the $`\eta `$ meson the kinematical refit procedure only improves the resolution of the $`\eta `$ signal by about $`25\%`$, due to the lower laboratory momenta of the outgoing protons.

The dashed curve represents the background contribution and the solid curve shows the sum of the background and the signal (dotted curve). The shape of the signal was determined from the Monte Carlo simulations and the yield was determined analogously as described above for the $`\eta `$ meson yield. The background below the $`\eta `$ meson signal originates mainly from non-resonant $`pppp\eta \pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ production and reactions such as $`pppp\pi ^+\pi ^{}\pi \pi `$ where two pions are not detected. Since the exact form is unknown, the shape of the background was parameterized as a $`4^{th}`$ order polynomial, that provides the best $`\chi ^2`$ to the fit.

The relative acceptance correction of the DISTO spectrometer for the $`pp\eta `$ vs. $`pp\eta `$ channels has been determined using Monte Carlo simulations which were analyzed as the measured data.

The detector acceptance was determined as a 4-dimensional function of all relevant degrees of freedom in the $`pp\eta `$ and $`pp\eta `$ final states.

The five degrees of freedom related to the three body decay of the $`\eta `$ and the $`\eta `$ mesons were integrated in the simulations using an isotropic orientation of the decay plane and the measured matrix elements .

After accounting for azimuthal symmetry in the production reaction, we divided the kinematically allowed phase space into four-dimensional bins and evaluated the efficiency for each bin separately. This was realized by storing the number of generated and the number of reconstructed events from the simulations for each phase space bin. The bin-by-bin ratio provides the efficiency correction, which was stored in the 4-dimensional acceptance correction matrix.

The acceptance values were typically larger than $`1\%`$ in each phase space bin including branching ratios, particle decay in flight, tracking efficiency and particle identification efficiency. The approximately $`6\%`$ efficiency loss due to the refit procedure was also accounted for. The data were corrected using the appropriate entry from this 4-dimensional acceptance correction matrix, on an event by event basis. For a detailed discussion of the relative acceptance correction method see .

The simulations indicated a very low acceptance of the apparatus for $`\eta `$ mesons produced in the backward hemisphere in the CM (center of mass) rest frame. However, since the entrance consists of two identical particles a reflection symmetry about $`\mathrm{\Theta }_{CM}=90^{}`$ exists, thus the backward data are redundant for determining total cross sections. Therefore, we only analyzed the acceptance-corrected production yield in the forward hemisphere, where the acceptance was non-zero in each phase space bin.

It should be noted that the acceptance correction is essentially independent of the event generator used in the simulations due to the complete phase space coverage of the DISTO spectrometer. The generator used for the correction assumed uniform phase space density for both reactions. This assumption was verified by using the same correction for different phase space populations in the simulations. The small deviations observed are included in the estimation of the systematic errors.

Furthermore, the simulations included all important decay modes for the $`\eta `$ meson  for the acceptance correction of the $`pppp\eta pp\pi ^+\pi ^{}\eta `$ and the $`pppp\eta `$ reactions. Hence, background processes such as $`\eta \pi ^+\pi ^{}\eta \pi ^+\pi ^{}(\pi ^+\pi ^{}\pi ^0)`$, where one or both of the observed pions are from the $`\eta `$ or events with more than four charged particles in the acceptance of the detector are properly accounted for.

After correcting the $`\eta `$ meson and the $`\eta `$ meson production yields for the respective acceptances and branching ratios  as described above, the measured total cross section ratio $`\text{R}=\sigma _{pppp\eta }/\sigma _{pppp\eta }`$ is determined to be $`(0.83\pm 0.11_{0.18}^{+0.23})\times 10^2`$. Where the first error is statistical and the second error range is due to systematic uncertainties. Because both meson channels have been reconstructed in events with the same four-charged-particle final state and measured simultaneously within the same experiment, many systematic uncertainties cancel when considering the production ratio. As a result, the systematic error is dominated by the background subtraction and the relative acceptance correction.

The total cross section for the $`pppp\eta `$ reaction is known over a wide energy range  above and below the beam momentum of this measurement. Interpolation of the existing data leads to a cross section of $`\sigma _{pppp\eta }^{exp}=135\pm 35\mu b`$ at $`p_{beam}=3.67\text{GeV}/\text{c}`$ in good agreement of the value $`\sigma _{pppp\eta }^{model}120\mu b`$ calculated by Vetter et al.  using a meson exchange model. By multiplying R by $`\sigma _{pppp\eta }^{exp}`$ we obtain the total cross section $`\sigma _{pppp\eta }=1.12\pm 0.15_{0.31}^{+0.42}\mu b`$. The systematic error in $`\sigma _{pppp\eta }^{exp}`$ is geometrically added with the systematic error in the $`pppp\eta /pppp\eta `$ ratio. This result is shown in Fig. 3 (filled circle) together with other data closer to the production threshold  and model calculations (solid and dashed curves) .

The calculation from Sibirtsev et al.  represents a one-pion-exchange model including the $`pp`$ FSI. The solid line denotes the full calculation and the dashed line corresponds to the same calculation excluding the FSI. The full calculation reproduces the near threshold data well, but predicts a cross section of about $`2.3\mu b`$ at our energy, which is significantly above our measurement.

The distribution of the differential cross section as a function of the CM polar angle of the $`\eta `$ meson ($`\mathrm{cos}(\mathrm{\Theta }_{CM})`$) is shown in Fig. 4. The distribution displays no significant deviations from isotropy, indicating that the $`\eta `$ meson is predominantly in a s-wave state relative to the two protons. The differential cross section distributions were determined by producing the corresponding $`(M_{miss}^{pp})^2`$ spectra for each kinematical bin. Each spectrum was fitted analogously as described above to determine the yield of the signal for each bin. The statistical uncertainty of the yield for each bin are determined by the fitting procedure and are shown as vertical error bars in the differential distributions (see Fig. 4 and Fig. 5). The signal line shape was calculated for each spectrum individually from the Monte Carlo simulations and the background was also allowed to vary.

The relative partial wave contributions in the three particle final state $`pp\eta `$ can also be determined from the momentum distributions $`q`$ and $`p`$, where $`q`$ is the CM momentum of the $`\eta `$ meson and $`p`$ is the momentum of a proton in the proton-proton rest frame.

Then, the total cross section is given as the sum of the individual partial wave contributions :

$$\sigma \underset{l_1,l_2}{}|M_{l_1,l_2}|^2𝑑\rho _{l_1l_2}.$$
(1)
here the sum extends over the angular momenta $`l_1,l_2`$ and the transition amplitude for the given exit channel ($`M_{l_1,l_2}`$) , where $`l_1`$ is the orbital angular momentum of the two protons relative to each other and $`l_2`$ is the orbital angular momentum of the $`\eta `$ meson relative to the proton-proton system.

The corresponding phase space element $`d\rho _{l_1l_2}`$ is determined by

$$d\rho _{l_1l_2}p^{2l_1+1}q^{2l_2+2}dq,$$
(2)
If we assume the transition amplitude $`M_{l_1,l_2}`$ to be almost constant over the available phase space then the differential cross section as a function of the particle momenta are given by the variation of the phase space volume.

The measured differential cross sections are plotted in Fig. 5. as a function of $`q`$ (upper frame) and $`p`$ (lower frame). The corresponding curves, that reproduce the data quite well, have been obtained from equation 2, assuming $`l_1=l_2=0`$. The normalization was obtained by a simultaneous $`\chi ^2`$ minimization to both differential cross section distributions. The introduction of higher values of $`l`$ does not improve the $`\chi ^2`$ fit to the data. The result is consistent with a dominant Ss-wave production of the $`\eta `$ meson, where S denotes $`l_1=0`$ and s $`l_2=0`$, respectively.

In conclusion, the production of the pseudoscalar $`\eta `$ meson has been studied in the $`pp`$ reaction at $`p_{beam}=3.67\text{GeV/c}`$. The $`\eta `$ meson has been reconstructed by measuring its charged decay products. The $`\eta /\eta `$ cross section ratio has been determined and the extracted $`\eta `$ cross section has been compared to data very close to threshold and an one-pion exchange model including the $`pp`$ FSI. While the model describes the data close to threshold very well it overestimates our data point by about $`100\%`$.

Furthermore, the differential cross sections indicates that the $`\eta `$ meson is predominantly produced in a s-wave state for the two protons relative to each other and the $`\eta `$ meson relative to the proton-proton system.

Calculations up to $`100\text{MeV}`$ above the $`\eta `$ production threshold, in the framework of a relativistic meson-exchange model  should be extended to higher energies. Comparison with our results should help to learn more about the different $`\eta `$ meson production mechanisms, the potential influence of a $`\eta p`$ FSI  and the magnitude of the coupling constant $`g_{\eta pp}`$.

In this context a comparison with a recent publication on the production of $`\pi ^0`$, $`\eta `$ and $`\eta `$ mesons in proton-proton collisions  should be very helpful. The novel approach therein factored out the $`pp`$ FSI and the initial-state proton-proton interaction (ISI) from the total cross section to determine the phase space dependence of the total production amplitude for $`\pi ^0`$ ($`|A_0^\pi |`$), $`\eta `$ ($`|A_0^\eta |`$) and $`\eta `$ mesons ($`|A_0^\eta |`$).

Our measurement will assist to evaluate different models used for the parameterization of the $`pp`$ FSI which is essential for the determination of the absolute strength of $`|A_0^\eta |^2`$ and hence of $`g_{\eta pp}`$.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Igor Falomkin.

We acknowledge the work provided by the SATURNE II accelerator staff and technical support groups in delivering an excellent proton beam and assisting this experimental program.

This work has been supported in part by: CNRS-IN2P3, CEA-DSM, NSF, INFN, KBN (2 P03B 117 10 and 2 P03B 115 15) and GSI.