ηcproduction at the Large Hadron Collider

We have studied the production of the 1 S 0 charmonium state, η c , at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the framework of non-relativistic quantum chromodynamics (NRQCD) using heavy-quark symmetry. We find that NRQCD predicts a large production cross-section for this resonance at the LHC even after taking into account the small branching ratio of η c into two photons. We show that it will be possible to test NRQCD through its predictions for η c , with the statistics that will be achieved at the early stage of the LHC, running at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV with an integrated luminosity of 100 pb −1 .