Diffractive photoproduction of heavy quarks in hadronic collisions

Abstract

In this article we study the diffractive photoproduction of heavy quarks in hadronic ($pp/pA/AA$) interactions for Tevatron and LHC energies. The integrated cross section and rapidity distribution for the process ${h}_{1}{h}_{2}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{h}_{1}{h}_{2}Q\overline{Q}$ (${h}_{i}=p$, $A$ and $Q=c$, $b$) are estimated using the color glass condensate (CGC) formalism. Our results indicate that this production channel has larger cross sections than the competing reactions of double diffractive production and coherent $AA$ reactions initiated by two-photon collisions.