Diffractive dijet photoproduction in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC in next-to-leading order QCD

Abstract

We make predictions for the cross sections of diffractive dijet photoproduction in $pp$, $pA$ and $AA$ ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) at the LHC during Runs 1 and 2 using next-to-leading perturbative QCD. We find that the resulting cross sections are sufficiently large and, compared to lepton-proton scattering at HERA, have an enhanced sensitivity to small observed momentum fractions in the diffractive exchange, commonly denoted $z_{P}^{\rm jets}$, and an unprecedented reach in the invariant mass of the photon-nucleon system $W$. We examine two competing schemes of diffractive QCD factorization breaking, which assume either a global suppression factor or a suppression for resolved photons only and demonstrate that the two scenarios can be distinguished by the nuclear dependence of the distributions in the observed parton momentum fraction in the photon $x_{\gamma}^{\rm jets}$.