Central exclusive meson pair production in the perturbative regime

Abstract

We present a study of the central exclusive production (CEP) of meson pairs, MMbar, at sufficiently high invariant mass that a perturbative QCD formalism is applicable. Within this framework, MMbar production proceeds via the gg --> MMbar hard scattering sub-process, which can be calculated within the hard exclusive formalism. We present explicit calculations for the gg --> MMbar helicity amplitudes for different meson states and, using these, show results for meson pair CEP in the perturbative regime.

Comments: Talk given by L.A. Harland-Lang at 46th Rencontres de Moriond (QCD Session), La Thuile, March 20-27, 2011