High mass exclusive diffractive dijet production in $\mathbf{p\bar{p}}$ collisions at $\mathbf{\sqrt{s}}$ = 1.96 TeV

TL;DR

This paper provides evidence for high-mass exclusive diffractive dijet production in proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV, using calorimeter data to identify events with minimal additional energy, indicating a rare diffractive process.

Contribution

First evidence of high-mass exclusive diffractive dijet production at Tevatron energies, demonstrating a novel method to identify such events with low extraneous energy.

Findings

Significant number of events with invariant dijet mass > 100 GeV detected.

Probability of these events arising from other processes is extremely low ($2 imes 10^{-5}$).

Observed significance is 4.1 standard deviations.

Abstract

We present evidence for diffractive exclusive dijet production with an invariant dijet mass greater than 100 GeV in data collected with the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. A discriminant based on calorimeter information is used to measure a significant number of events with little energy (typically less than 10 GeV) outside the dijet system, consistent with the diffractive exclusive dijet production topology. The probability for these events to be explained by other dijet production processes is $2 \times 10^{-5}$, corresponding to a 4.1 standard deviation significance.