A Study of Inclusive Double-Pomeron-Exchange in p pbar -> p X pbar at root s = 630 GeV

Abstract

We report measurements of the inclusive reaction, p pbar -> p X pbar, in events where either or both the beam-like final-state baryons were detected in Roman-pot spectrometers and the central system was detected in the UA2 calorimeter. A Double-Pomeron-Exchange (DPE) analysis of these data and single diffractive data from the same experiment demonstrates that, for central masses of a few GeV, the extracted Pomeron-Pomeron total cross section exhibits an enhancement which exceeds factorization expectations by an order-of-magnitude. This may be a signature for glueball production. The enhancement is shown to be independent of uncertainties connected with possible non-universality of the Pomeron flux factor. Based on our analysis, we present DPE cross section predictions, for unit (1 mb) Pomeron-Pomeron total cross section, at the Tevatron, LHC and the 920 GeV fixed-target experiment, HERA-B.