Exclusive quarkonium production in pp collisions

Central exclusive production (CEP) processes in high-energy proton – (anti)proton collisions offer a very promising framework within which to study both novel aspects of QCD and new physics signals. Among the many interesting processes that can be studied in this way, those involving the production of heavy (c,b) quarkonia states are of particular importance, serving as ‘standard candle’ processes with which we can benchmark predictions for new physics CEP at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, as well as being of interest in their own right. We report on our recent quantitative studies of exclusive heavy quarkonia (χ and η) production, and make cross section predictions for the LHC, Tevatron and RHIC. We also examine the possibility of observing quarkonium CEP at RHIC with tagged forward protons, for which measurements of the outgoing proton momenta would provide interesting spin-parity information about the centrally produced state.