Diffractive dissociation of gluons into heavy quark-antiquark pairs in proton-proton collisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the process of gluons diffractively dissociating into heavy quark-antiquark pairs in proton-proton collisions, providing detailed calculations of cross sections and distributions relevant for LHC energies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel calculation of the diffractive dissociation of gluons into heavy quarks, including impact parameter and momentum space amplitudes, and evaluates cross sections using various gluon distributions.

Findings

Cross sections for charm and bottom production are calculated at LHC energies.

The ratio of bottom-to-charm cross sections varies with kinematic variables.

Differential distributions in transverse momentum, rapidity, and invariant mass are provided.

Abstract

We discuss diffractive dissociation of gluons into heavy quark pairs. The particular mechanism is similar to the diffractive dissociation of virtual photons into quarks, which drives diffractive deep inelastic production of charm in the low-mass diffraction, or large $\beta$-region. There, it can be understood, with some reservations, in terms of a valence heavy quark content of the Pomeron. The amplitude for the $g p \to Q \bar Q p$ is derived in the impact parameter and momentum space. The cross section for single diffractive $p p \to Q \bar Q p X$ is calculated as a convolution of the elementary cross section and gluon distribution in the proton. Integrated cross section and the differential distributions in e.g. transverse momentum and rapidity of the charm and bottom quark and antiquark, as well as the quark-antiquark invariant mass are calculated for the nominal LHC energy for different unintegrated gluon distributions from the literature. The ratio of the bottom-to-charm cross sections are shown and discussed as a function of several kinematical variables.