https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-011-1714-2
Regular Article – Theoretical Physics
Central exclusive meson pair production in the perturbative regime at hadron colliders
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: lh367@cam.ac.uk
Received:
11
May
2011
Revised:
28
June
2011
Published online:
2
August
2011
The central exclusive production (CEP) of heavy resonance states that subsequently decay into meson pairs, 
, is an important signature for such processes at hadron colliders. However, there is a potentially important background from the direct QCD production of meson pairs, as mediated for example by the exclusive 
hard scattering subprocess. This is in fact an interesting process in its own right, testing novel aspects of perturbative QCD technology. We explicitly calculate the 
helicity amplitudes for different meson states within the hard exclusive formalism, and comment on the application of MHV techniques to the calculation. Using these results, we describe how meson pair CEP can be calculated in the perturbative regime, and present some sample numerical predictions for a variety of final states. We also briefly consider the dominant non-perturbative contributions, which are expected to be important when the meson transverse momentum is small.
© Springer-Verlag / Società Italiana di Fisica, 2011
