Quarkonium Production through Hard Comover Scattering

We propose a qualitatively new mechanism for quarkonium production, motivated by the global features of the experimental data and by the successes/failures of existing models. In QCD, heavy quarks are created in conjunction with a bremsstrahlung color field emitted by the colliding partons. We study the effects of perturbative gluon exchange between the quark pair and a comoving color field. Such scattering can flip the spin and color of the quarks to create a non-vanishing overlap with the wave function of physical quarkonium. Several observed features that are difficult to understand in current models find simple explanations. Transverse gluon exchange produces unpolarized J/psi's, the chi_c1 and chi_c2 states are produced at similar rates, and the anomalous dependence of the J/psi cross section on the nuclear target size can be qualitatively understood.