Predictions for exclusive $\Upsilon$ photoproduction in ultraperipheral ${\rm Pb}+{\rm Pb}$ collisions at the LHC at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD

We present predictions for the rapidity-differential cross sections of exclusive $\Upsilon$ photoproduction in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) of lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We work in the framework of collinear factorization at next-to-leading order (NLO) in perturbative QCD, modeling the generalized parton distributions (GPDs) through the Shuvaev transform of nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs). While the effects due to the GPD modeling turn out to be small, the direct NLO predictions still carry significant nPDF-originating uncertainties and depend strongly on the choices of the factorization and renormalization scales. To tame the scale dependence and to ac…