QCD diffractive mechanism of exclusive image pair production at high energies Original Research Article

We discuss new diffractive mechanism of central exclusive production of image pairs in proton–proton collisions at the LHC. We include diagrams with intermediate virtual Higgs boson as well as quark box diagrams. Several observables related to this process are calculated. Predictions for the total cross section and differential distributions in W-boson rapidity and transverse momentum as well as WW invariant mass are presented. We also show results for different polarization states of the final image bosons. We compare the contribution of the image mechanism considered in the literature with the contribution of the diffractive mechanism through the image subprocess for the different observables. The phase space integrated diffractive contribution when separated is only a small fraction of fb compared to 115.4 fb of the γγ-contribution without absorption. The latter contribution dominates at small four-momentum transfers squared in the proton lines and in a broad range of image invariant masses. This offers a possibility of efficient searches for anomalous triple-boson (γWW) and quartic-boson (image) couplings and testing models beyond the Standard Model. We discuss shortly also the image process, where the box contribution is very similar to that for image and compare our results with recent CDF data. Nice agreement has been achieved without additional free parameters.