Exclusive production of χc(0+) meson and its measurement in the π+π− channel

We report on the results of a theoretical study of the central exclusive production of scalar χc(0+) meson via χc0→π+π− decay in high-energy hadron collisions at the RHIC, Tevatron and LHC. The corresponding amplitude for exclusive double-diffractive χc0 meson production was obtained within the kt-factorization approach including virtualities of active gluons and the cross section is calculated with unintegrated gluon distribution functions (UGDFs) known from the literature. The four-body pp→ppπ+π− reaction constitutes an irreducible background to the exclusive χc0 meson production. We include the absorption effects due to proton-proton interaction and pion-pion rescattering. Several differential distributions for pp(p¯)→pp(p¯)χc0 process, including the absorptive corrections, were calculated. The influence of kinematical cuts on the signal-to-background ratio is investigated.