Modelling exclusive meson pair production at hadron colliders

We present a study of the central exclusive production of light meson pairs, concentrating on the region of lower invariant masses of the central system and/or meson transverse momentum, where perturbative QCD cannot be reliably applied. We describe in detail a phenomenological model, using the tools of Regge theory, that may be applied with some success in this regime, and we present the new, publicly available, Dime Monte Carlo (MC) implementation of this for ππ, KK and ρρ production. The MC implementation includes a fully differential treatment of the survival factor, which in general depends on all kinematic variables, as well as allows for the so far reasonably unconstrained model parameters to be set by the user. We present predictions for the Tevatron and LHC, discuss and estimate the size of the proton-dissociative background, and show how future measurements may further test this Regge-based approach, as well as the soft hadronic model required to calculate the survival factor, in particular in the presence of tagged protons. (orig.)