https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-009-1214-9
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Central exclusive χ c meson production at the Tevatron revisited
1
Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, J.J. Thomson Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 0HE, UK
2
Department of Physics and Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, University of Durham, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
3
School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
4
Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, Gatchina, St. Petersburg, 188300, Russia
* e-mail: v.a.khoze@durham.ac.uk
Received:
28
September
2009
Published online:
24
November
2009
Motivated by the recent experimental observation of exclusive χ c events at the Tevatron, we revisit earlier studies of central exclusive scalar χ c0 meson production, before generalising the existing formalism to include χ c1 and χ c2 mesons. Although χ c0 production was previously assumed to be dominant, we find that the χ c1 and χ c2 rates for the experimentally considered χ c →J/ψ γ→μ + μ − γ decay process are in fact comparable to the χ c0 rate. We have developed a new Monte Carlo event generator, SuperCHIC, which models the central exclusive production of the three χ c states via this decay chain, and have explored possible ways of distinguishing them, given that their mass differences are not resolvable within the current experimental set-up. Although we find that the severity of current experimental cuts appears to preclude this, the acceptance does not change crucially between the three states and so our conclusions regarding the overall rates remain unchanged. This therefore raises the interesting possibility that exclusive χ c1 and χ c2 production has already been observed at the Tevatron.
© Springer-Verlag / Società Italiana di Fisica, 2010
