Central exclusive meson pair production in the perturbative regime

TL;DR

This paper investigates the production of meson pairs in high-energy proton collisions using perturbative QCD, providing explicit calculations of the underlying scattering amplitudes and demonstrating the applicability of the formalism.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed perturbative QCD framework for central exclusive meson pair production and computes specific helicity amplitudes for different meson states.

Findings

Explicit helicity amplitude calculations for gg --> MMbar

Validation of perturbative QCD applicability at high invariant mass

Predictions for meson pair production rates in the perturbative regime

Abstract

We present a study of the central exclusive production (CEP) of meson pairs, MMbar, at sufficiently high invariant mass that a perturbative QCD formalism is applicable. Within this framework, MMbar production proceeds via the gg --> MMbar hard scattering sub-process, which can be calculated within the hard exclusive formalism. We present explicit calculations for the gg --> MMbar helicity amplitudes for different meson states and, using these, show results for meson pair CEP in the perturbative regime.