Diffractive di-hadron production at NLO within the shockwave formalism

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading-order cross-sections for diffractive di-hadron production at high transverse momentum using shockwave formalism, advancing theoretical understanding of small-x QCD processes.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid factorization approach combining collinear and small-x formalisms for NLO calculations in diffractive processes.

Findings

Divergences are shown to cancel in the NLO calculation.

Finite parts of the cross-section are extracted for general kinematics.

The formalism advances precision in diffractive QCD predictions.

Abstract

We compute the next-leading-order cross-sections for diffractive electro- or photoproduction of a pair of hadrons with large $p_T$, out of a nucleus or a nucleon. A hybrid factorization is used, mixing collinear and small-$x$ factorizations, more precisely shockwave formalism. We demonstrate the cancellation of divergences and extract the finite parts of the differential cross-section in general kinematics.