Eur. Phys. J. C 24, 581-587 (2002)
DOI: 10.1007/s10052-002-0990-2

Physics with tagged forward protons at the LHC

V.A. Khoze^{1, 2}, A.D. Martin¹ and M.G. Ryskin<sup>1, 2

1</sup>  Department of Physics and Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, University of Durham, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
²  Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, Gatchina, St. Petersburg, 188300, Russia

(Received: 15 March 2002 / Published online: 21 June 2002 )

Abstract
We emphasize the importance of tagging the outgoing forward protons to sharpen the predictions for New Physics at the LHC (such as the diffractive production of a light Higgs boson). The rescattering effects lead to a rich distinctive structure of the cross section as a function of the transverse momenta of the protons. We show that a study of the correlations between the proton transverse momenta for double-diffractive production of central dijets will provide a detailed check of the whole diffractive formalism. Adopting a perturbative two-gluon structure of the Pomeron, we emphasize that 2⁺⁺ quarkonium production, via Pomeron-Pomeron fusion, is strongly suppressed. This offers a favourable production mechanism for non- states, such as glueballs.

© Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag 2002