Exclusive central production of heavy quarks at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper develops a $k_T$ factorisation framework for exclusive central production of heavy quark pairs at the LHC, leveraging NLO BFKL evolution to obtain unintegrated gluon densities in transverse momentum space. The production is described via a convolution of these densities with a high-energy RR vertex and a LO heavy-quark production vertex, with a fully iterative, Monte Carlo-ready Green function allowing exclusive multi-gluon emissions. The work emphasizes natural energy-scale choices that yield an unintegrated gluon density interpretation and discusses modeling of the proton impact factor. The approach aims to provide testable predictions for bottom and top quark pair production at the LHC and to serve as a bridge between high-energy resummation and collider phenomenology, with future work including numerical implementation and data-driven fits.

Abstract

We study the exclusive production of heavy flavors at central rapidities in hadron-hadron collisions within the kT factorisation formalism. Since this involves regions of small Bjorken x in the unintegrated gluon densities, we include the next-to-leading order BFKL contributions working directly in transverse momentum representation. Our results are presented in a form suitable for Monte Carlo implementation.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Central production of two heavy quarks in $k_T$ factorisation