Central exclusive production of dijets at hadronic colliders

Abstract

In view of the recent diffractive dijet data from CDF run II, we critically re-evaluate the standard approach to the calculation of central production of dijets in quasi-elastic hadronic collisions. We find that the process is dominated by the non-perturbative region, and that even perturbative ingredients, such as the Sudakov form factor, are not under theoretical control. Comparison with data allows us to fix some of the uncertainties. Although we focus on dijets, our arguments apply to other high-mass central systems, such as the Higgs boson.Comment: 37 pages, 18 figures. Two new appendices, and a discussion of the upper scale of the Sudakov form factor are introduced. The text about the calculation of the uncertainties has been rewritte