New contributions to central exclusive production of dijets in proton-(anti)proton collisions

TL;DR

This paper derives and analyzes the amplitude for central exclusive gg dijet production in proton-(anti)proton collisions at LHC and Tevatron, considering different gluon polarizations and emission mechanisms, and compares various production contributions.

Contribution

It introduces new calculations including gluon emissions from different t-channel lines and quark-antiquark dijets, with novel approaches for special kinematics and gluon correlations.

Findings

The second emission mechanism is significantly smaller than previously thought.

Rapidity and transverse momentum distributions are provided for various production mechanisms.

The results help refine background estimates for exclusive Higgs production.

Abstract

We consider central exclusive production of $gg$ dijets in proton-proton (proton-antiproton) collisions at LHC and Tevatron for different intermediate and final gluon polarisations. The amplitude for the process is derived within the $k_\perp$-factorization approach (with both the standard QCD and the Lipatov's effective three-gluon verticies) and is considered in various kinematical asymptotia, in particular, in the important limit of high-$p_\perp$ jets. Compared to earlier works we include emissions of gluons from different gluonic $t$-channel lines as well as emission of quark-antiquark dijets. Rapidity distributions, gluon jet $p_\perp$ distributions and invariant dijet mass distributions are presented. We explore the competition of the standard diagram with both jets emitted from a single $t$-channel gluon and the one with the emission from both $t$-channel gluons. The second mechanism requires a special treatment. We propose two different approaches. Including special kinematics and using properties of off-diagonal gluons at small $x$ and $\xi$ we arrive to correlations in two-dimensional distributions in rapidity of one and second jet. We find that the second contribution is much smaller than that known from the literature. The digluon production constitutes an important background to exclusive Higgs production.