BFKL evolution and the growth with energy of exclusive J/Psi and Upsilon photo-production cross-sections

We investigate whether the Balitsky-Fadin-Kuraev-Lipatov (BFKL) low x evolution equation is capable to describe the energy dependence of the exclusive photo-production cross-section of vector mesons J/Psi and Upsilon on protons. Such cross-sections have been measured by both HERA experiments H1 and ZEUS in electron-proton collisions and by LHC experiments ALICE, CMS and LHCb in ultra-peripheral proton-proton and ultra-peripheral proton-lead collisions. Our approach provides a perturbative description of the rise with energy and relies only on a fit of the initial transverse momentum profile of the proton impact factor, which can be extracted from BFKL fits to inclusive HERA data. We find that BFKL evolution is capable to provide a very good description of the energy dependence of the current data set, while the available fits of the proton impact factor require an adjustment in the overall normalization.