Central production of lepton-antilepton pairs and heavy quark composite states in hadron diffractive collisions at ultrahigh energies

Abstract

Central production of lepton-lepton pairs ($e^{+}{e}^{-}$ and ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$) and heavy quark composite states (charmonia and bottomonia) in diffractive proton collisions (proton momenta transferred $|{\mathbf{q}}_{\perp }|\sim m/\ln s$) are studied at ultrahigh energies ($\ln s>>1$), where ${\sigma }_{tot}(p{p}^{\pm })\sim {\ln }^{N}s$ with $1\la N\la 2$. The $p{p}^{\pm }$-rescattering corrections, which are not small, are calculated in terms of the $K$-matrix approach modified for ultrahigh energies. Two versions of hadron interactions are considered in detail: the growth (i) ${\sigma }_{tot}(p{p}^{\pm })\sim {\ln }^{2}s$, ${\sigma }_{inel}(p{p}^{\pm })\sim {\ln }^{2}s$ within the black disk mode and (ii) ${\sigma }_{tot}(p{p}^{\pm })\sim {\ln }^{2}s$, ${\sigma }_{inel}(p{p}^{\pm })\sim \ln s$ within the resonant disk mode. The energy behavior of the diffractive production processes differs strongly for these modes, thus giving a possibility to distinguish between the versions of the ultrahigh energy interactions.

10 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1408.0692

References in corpus (1)

• Measurement of the proton-air cross-section at $\sqrt{s}=57$ TeV with the Pierre Auger Observatory