Reconciling the light-cone and nonrelativistic QCD approaches to calculating e+ e- -> J/psi + eta_c

It has been suggested in Ref. [A. E. Bondar and V. L. Chernyak, Phys. Lett. B 612, 215 (2005)] that the disagreement between theoretical calculations and experimental observations for the rate for the process e+ e- -> J/psi + eta_c at the B factories might be resolved by using the light-cone method to take into account the relative momentum of the heavy-quark and antiquark in the quarkonia. The light-cone result for the production cross section in Ref. [A. E. Bondar and V. L. Chernyak, Phys. Lett. B 612, 215 (2005)] is almost an order of magnitude larger than existing NRQCD factorization results. We investigate this apparent theoretical discrepancy. We compute light-cone distribution functions by making use of quarkonium wave functions from the Cornell potential model. Our light-cone distribution functions are similar in shape to those of Ref. [A. E. Bondar and V. L. Chernyak, Phys. Lett. B 612, 215 (2005)] and yield a similar cross section. However, when we subtract parts of the light-cone distribution functions that correspond to corrections of relative-order alpha_s in the NRQCD approach, we find that the cross section decreases by about a factor of three. When we set certain renormalization factors Z_i in the light-cone calculation equal to unity, we find a further reduction in the cross section of about a factor of two. The resulting light-cone cross section is similar in magnitude to the NRQCD factorization cross sections and shows only a modest enhancement over the light-cone cross section in which the relative momentum of the heavy-quark and antiquark is neglected.