We investigate $J/\psi$ photoproduction off the proton, $\gamma p\to J/\psi p$, to elucidate the nonexistence of hidden-charm pentaquark signals reported by the GlueX and CLAS12 experiments. Within a coupled-channel rescattering mechanism, we employ the transition amplitudes from a previous coupled-channel analysis that dynamically generates the $P_{c\overline{c}}$ states. The kernel amplitudes for the transition to the $J/\psi N$ channel include both $t$-channel heavy-meson exchange and $u$-channel heavy-baryon exchange. We find that the rescattering contributions from the ${\overline{D}}^{(*)}{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c$ channels—indispensable for the formation of the $P_{c\overline{c}}$ resonances—are about one order of magnitude smaller than those from ${\overline{D}}^{(*)}{\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c$, since $g_{{\overline{D}}^{(*)}N{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c}$ is roughly 5 times smaller than $g_{{\overline{D}}^{(*)}N{\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c}$. Since the $P_{c\overline{c}}$ resonances couple to the $J/\psi N$ channel predominantly through the ${\overline{D}}^{(*)}{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c$ intermediate states, their suppression prevents the pentaquark signal from appearing in photoproduction. With only a single parameter controlling the overall normalization, the present work describes the GlueX and CLAS12 cross sections well. These results suggest that the null result from photoproduction need not be in conflict with the pentaquark signals observed by the LHCb Collaboration.

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