Hard Diffraction with Proton Tagging at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential of proton tagging techniques at the LHC for studying various diffractive processes, including detector acceptance, event probabilities, and measurements of specific particle productions.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the ATLAS forward proton detectors' acceptance and evaluates the feasibility of measuring different diffractive processes using proton tagging.

Findings

Acceptance of ATLAS detectors varies with LHC optics settings.

Probabilities of observing protons from minimum-bias events are quantified.

Feasibility of measuring exclusive and semi-exclusive jet productions is assessed.

Abstract

The main parts of the LHC diffractive physics programme possible to be measured using a proton tagging technique are presented. The geometric acceptance of the ATLAS forward proton detectors: ALFA and AFP for various LHC optics settings are shown. The probabilities of observing a proton originating from a minimum-bias event in ALFA and AFP stations are given. The main properties of single diffractive and double Pomeron exchange production of dijets, photon+jet, jet-gap-jet and W/Z bosons are discussed. The possibility of measuring the jet production in exclusive (double proton tag) and semi-exclusive (single tag) mode is evaluated.