Diffractive Dijet Production

Abstract

We explore the diffractive interaction of a proton with an anti-proton which results in centrally produced dijets. This process has been recently studied at the Tevatron. We make predictions within an Ingelman-Schlein approach and compare them to the recent data presented by the CDF collaboration. Earlier calculations resulted in theoretical cross-sections which are much larger than those observed by CDF. We find that, after consideration of hadronisation effects and the parton shower, and using parton density functions extracted from diffractive deep inelastic scattering at HERA, it is possible to explain the CDF data. We need to assume a gap survival probability of around 10% and this is in good agreement with the value predicted by theory. We also find that the non-diffractive contribution to the process is probably significant in the kinematical region probed by the Tevatron.