Towards the theory of coherent hard dijet production on hadrons and nuclei

We carry out a detailed calculation of the cross section of pion diffraction dissociation into two jets with large transverse momenta, originating from a hard gluon exchange between the pion constituents. Both the quark and the gluon contribution are considered and in the latter case we present calculations both in covariant and in axial gauges. We find that the standard collinear factorization does not hold in this reaction. The structure of non-factorizable contributions is discussed and the results are compared with the experimental data. Our conclusion is that the existing theoretical uncertainties do not allow, for the time being, for a quantitative extraction of the pion distribution amplitude