Proton dissociation into three jets

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to observe hard exclusive three-jet production at the LHC, which probes the proton's gluon distribution and valence quark structure through a k_t factorization approach.

Contribution

It introduces a method to calculate the cross section for three-jet diffractive dissociation, highlighting the feasibility of observing this process at the LHC.

Findings

Observation feasible for jet transverse momenta around 5 GeV

Sensitive to small-x gluon distribution and valence quark configuration

Provides estimates for cross sections of three-jet production

Abstract

We explore the possibility to observe hard exclusive three-jet production in early LHC runs, corresponding to diffractive dissociation of the incident proton into three jets with large but compensating transverse momenta. This process is sensitive to the proton unintegrated gluon distribution at small x and to the distribution of the three valence quarks in the proton at small transverse distances. The corresponding cross section is calculated using an approach based on k_t factorization. According to our estimates, observation of hard diffractive three-jet production at LHC is feasible for jet transverse momenta q_perp \sim 5 GeV.