Central diffractive production of heavy states (massive dijets, Higgs boson) is studied in the exclusive mode using a new Hybrid Pomeron Model (HPM). Built from Hybrid Pomerons defined by the combination of one hard and one soft color exchanges, the model describes well the centrally produced diffractive dijet data at the Tevatron. Predictions for the Higgs boson and dijet exclusive production at the LHC are presented.
The prospects for central exclusive diffractive (CED) production of MSSM Higgs bosons at the LHC are reviewed. It is shown that the CED channels, making use of forward proton detectors at the LHC installed at 220 m and 420 m distance around ATLAS and / or CMS, can provide important information on the Higgs sector of the MSSM. In particular, CED production of the neutral CP-even Higgs bosons h and H and their decays into bottom quarks has the potential to probe interesting regions of the M_A--tan_beta parameter plane of the MSSM and may give access to the bottom Yukawa couplings of the Higgs bosons up to masses of M_H approx 250 GeV.
Exclusive diffractive production of real photons and vector mesons in ep collisions has been studied at HERA in a wide kinematic range. Here we present and discuss a Regge-type model of real photon production (Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering), as well as production of vector mesons (VMP) treated on the same footing by using an extension of a factorized Regge-pole model proposed earlier. The model has been fitted to the HERA data. Despite the very small number of the free parameters, the model gives a satisfactory description of the experimental data, both for the total cross section as a function of the photon virtuality Q2 or the energy W in the center of mass of the gammastar-p system, and the differential cross sections as a function of the squared four-momentum transfer t with fixed Q2 and W.
Calculations of central exclusive production are affected by very large perturbative and non-perturbative corrections. In this talk, we summarize the results of a study of the uncertainties on these corrections in the case of exclusive dijet production.
We investigate the theoretical description of the central exclusive production process, $h_1 + h_2 to h_1+X+h_2$. Taking Higgs production as an example, we compute the subset of next-to-leading order corrections sensitive to the Sudakov factor appearing in the process. Our results agree with those originally presented by Khoze, Martin and Ryskin except that the scale appearing in the Sudakov factor, $mu=0.62 sqrt{hat{s}}$, should be replaced with $mu=sqrt{hat{s}}$, where $sqrt{hat{s}}$ is the invariant mass of the centrally produced system. We show that the replacement leads to approximately a factor 2 suppression in the cross-section for central system masses in the range 100--500GeV.
In view of the recent diffractive dijet data from CDF run II, we critically re-evaluate the standard approach to the calculation of central production of dijets in quasi-elastic hadronic collisions. We find that the process is dominated by the non-perturbative region, and that even perturbative ingredients, such as the Sudakov form factor, are not under theoretical control. Comparison with data allows us to fix some of the uncertainties. Although we focus on dijets, our arguments apply to other high-mass central systems, such as the Higgs boson.