Diffractive production of charm quark/antiquark pairs at RHIC and LHC

Abstract

We have discussed single and central diffractive production of $c \bar c$ pairs in the Ingelman-Schlein model. In these calculations we have included diffractive parton distributions obtained by the H1 collaboration at HERA and absorption effects neglected in some early calculations in the literature. The absorption effects which are responsible for the naive Regge factorization breaking cause that the cross section for diffractive processes is much smaller than that for the fully inclusive case, but could be measured at RHIC and LHC by imposing special condition on rapidity gaps. We discuss also different approaches to diffractive production of heavy quark/antiquark. The particular mechanism is similar to the diffractive dissociation of virtual photons into quarks, which drives diffractive deep inelastic production of charm in the low-mass diffraction, or large $\beta$-region.