Probing the perturbative dynamics of exclusive meson pair production

TL;DR

This paper applies perturbative QCD to analyze exclusive meson pair production at large angles, revealing sensitivity of cross sections to meson wavefunction components and providing novel theoretical insights.

Contribution

It introduces a new application of the perturbative formalism to gg --> MMbar processes, highlighting the impact of meson wavefunction components on cross sections.

Findings

Cross sections for eta' and eta are sensitive to valence gluon components.

Theoretical predictions for meson pair production at high transverse momentum.

Insights into the structure of meson wavefunctions.

Abstract

We present the results of a recent novel application of the `hard exclusive' perturbative formalism to the process gg --> MMbar at large angles, where M (Mbar) is a light meson (anti-meson). As well as discussing the important theoretical features of the relevant leading-order gg --> qqbar(gg) qqbar(gg) 6-parton amplitudes, we also comment on their phenomenological implications. In particular, we consider the central exclusive production of meson pairs at comparatively large transverse momentum k_t, which is expected to proceed via this mechanism. We show that this leads to various non-trivial predictions for a range of exclusive processes, and that the cross sections for the eta' and eta mesons display significant sensitivity to any valence gg component of the meson wavefunctions.