Central exclusive chic meson production at the Tevatron revisited
Abstract
Motivated by the recent experimental observation of exclusive chic events at the Tevatron, we revisit earlier studies of central exclusive scalar chic0 meson production, before generalising the existing formalism to include chic1 and chic2 mesons. Although chic0 production was previously assumed to be dominant, we find that the chic1 and chic2 rates for the experimentally considered chic -> J/psi gamma -> mu+ mu- gamma decay process are in fact comparable to the chic0 rate. We have developed a new Monte Carlo event generator, SuperCHIC, which models the central exclusive production of the three chic states via this decay chain, and have explored possible ways of distinguishing them, given that their mass differences are not resolvable within the current experimental set-up. Although we find that the severity of current experimental cuts appears to preclude this, the acceptance does not change crucially between the three states and so our conclusions regarding the overall rates remain unchanged. This therefore raises the interesting possibility that exclusive chic1 and chic2 production has already been observed at the Tevatron.