Searching for odderon exchange in exclusive $pp\to pp\varphi$ and $pp\to pp\varphi \varphi$ reactions at the LHC

Abstract

The possibility to use the exclusive $pp\to pp\varphi$ and $pp\to pp\varphi \varphi$ reactions in identifying the odderon exchange is discussed. So far there is no unambiguous experimental evidence for the odderon, the charge conjugation $C=-1$ counterpart of the $C=+1$ pomeron. Recently proposed tensor-pomeron and vector-odderon model for soft high-energy reactions is applied. For the $pp\to pp\varphi$ reaction at high energies the photon-pomeron fusion is the dominant process and the odderon-pomeron fusion is an interesting alternative. Adding odderon exchange improves considerably description of the proton-proton angular correlations measured by the WA102 collaboration. The $pp\to pp\varphi \varphi$ process via pomeron-pomeron fusion is advantageous one as here the odderon does not couple to protons. The observation of large $M_{\varphi \varphi }$ and the rapidity difference $Y_{\varphi \varphi }$ seems well suited to identify odderon exchange. Comparisons with data from the WA102 experiment are made and predictions for LHC experiments are given.

Comments: 6 pages, 4 figures, a talk presented by P. Lebiedowicz at 40th International Conference on High Energy physics - ICHEP2020, July 28 - August 6, 2020, Prague, Czech Republic (virtual meeting). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2004.05938