Central Diffraction in Proton-Proton Collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$\,TeV with ALICE at LHC

Abstract

A double-gap topology is used for filtering central-diffractive events from a proton-proton minimum-bias data sample at a centre-of-mass energy {$\sqrt{s}=7$\,TeV}. This topology is defined by particle activity in the ALICE central barrel and absence of particle activity outside. The fraction of events satisfying the double-gap requirement $R_{DG}$ is found to be {$7.63\pm0.02(stat.)\pm0.87(syst.)\times 10^{-4}$}. The background of this double-gap fraction is estimated by studying the contributions of non-diffractive, single- and double-diffractive dissociation processes as modelled by Monte Carlo event generators, and is found to be about 10%.