Diffractive vector boson production at the Tevatron

Abstract

The diffractive production of vector bosons at the Tevatron is studied. We take a hard pomeron flux and use the H1 parton density functions extracted from their measurement of F_2^{D(3)}. To this we add a reggeon exchange contribution. We find that the ratio of diffractive to non-diffractive W boson production is in good agreement with the CDF data. We note that the poorly understood reggeon contribution might be as large as the pomeron contribution in the kinematic range of the data. We also note that our pomeron exchange contribution is much smaller than earlier predictions due to our use of a hard pomeron flux. All our results have been obtained using the lowest order matrix elements and we have compared to the results obtained using a modified version of Herwig which is capable of generating a wide variety of diffractive scattering processes. Gap survival is estimated using Pythia and is found to be around 60%. We make predictions which could be compared to future measurements of diffractive Drell-Yan production.