Feasibility Studies for Quarkonium Production at a Fixed-Target Experiment Using the LHC Proton and Lead Beams (AFTER@LHC)

Being used in the fixed-target mode, the multi-TeV LHC proton and lead beams allow for studies of heavy-flavour hadroproduction with unprecedented precision at backward rapidities, far negative Feynman-x, using conventional detection techniques. At the nominal LHC energies, quarkonia can be studied in detail in p+p, p+d, and p+A collisions at sNN≃115 GeV and in Pb + p and Pb + A collisions at sNN≃72 GeV with luminosities roughly equivalent to that of the collider mode that is up to 20 fb^-1 yr^-1 in p+p and p+d collisions, up to 0.6 fb^-1 yr^-1 in p+A collisions, and up to 10 nb^-1 yr^-1 in Pb + A collisions. In this paper, we assess the feasibility of such studies by performing fast simulations using the performance of a LHCb-like detector.