Coherent and noncoherent double diffractive production of QQ-bar pairs in heavy-ion collisions at high energies

The coherent and noncoherent double diffractive production of heavy quark-antiquark pairs in ion scattering at the LHC energies has been considered. The total and differential cross sections for such processes featuring the production of cc-bar and bb-bar quark pairs in pp, CaCa, and PbPb collisions have been estimated. It has been shown that the fraction of heavy quark-antiquark pairs produced in double diffractive scattering amounts to a few percent of the number of QQ-bar pairs produced in hard QCD scattering; therefore, it is necessary to take into account such processes in detecting heavy quarks, in seeking Higgs bosons of intermediate mass, in investigating the suppression of heavy quarkonia in quark-gluon plasma, and so on. It has been demonstrated that the cross section for coherent scattering is so large that this process can be used to study collective effects in nuclei at high energies. Large values of the quark-antiquark invariant mass, MQQ-bar > or approx. 100 GeV, in association with a large rapidity gap between diffractive jets, Δη>5, exemplify manifestations of such nuclear interactions