Standard candle central exclusive processes at the Tevatron and LHC

TL;DR

This paper studies central exclusive production processes involving heavy quarkonia and gamma gamma states at high-energy colliders, providing benchmarks for new physics searches and confirming their rich phenomenology.

Contribution

It offers a detailed quantitative analysis of CEP processes at Tevatron, RHIC, and LHC, highlighting their potential as standard candles for collider physics.

Findings

Good agreement with experimental data at Tevatron

Quantitative predictions for LHC and RHIC

Assessment of theoretical uncertainties

Abstract

Central exclusive production (CEP) processes in high-energy proton -- (anti)proton collisions offer a very promising framework within which to study both novel aspects of QCD and new physics signals. Among the many interesting processes that can be studied in this way, those involving the production of heavy (c,b) quarkonia and gamma gamma states have sufficiently well understood theoretical properties and sufficiently large cross sections that they can serve as `standard candle' processes with which we can benchmark predictions for new physics CEP at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Motivated by the broad agreement with theoretical predictions of recent CEP measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron, we perform a detailed quantitative study of heavy quarkonia (chi and eta) and gamma gamma production at the Tevatron, RHIC and LHC, paying particular attention to the various uncertainties in the calculations. Our results confirm the rich phenomenology that these production processes offer at present and future high-energy colliders.