Survival probability of large rapidity gaps in a QCD model with a dynamical infrared mass scale

Abstract

We compute the survival probability $<|S|^{2}>$ of large rapidity gaps (LRG) in a QCD based eikonal model with a dynamical gluon mass, where this dynamical infrared mass scale represents the onset of nonperturbative contributions to the diffractive hadron-hadron scattering. Since rapidity gaps can occur in the case of Higgs boson production via fusion of electroweak bosons, we focus on $WW\to H$ fusion processes and show that the resulting $<|S|^{2}>$ decreases with the increase of the energy of the incoming hadrons, in line with the available experimental data for LRG. We obtain $<|S|^{2} > = 27.6\pm7.8$ % ($ 18.2\pm7.0$ %) at Tevatron (CERN-LHC) energy for a dynamical gluon mass $m_{g}=400$ MeV.

15 pages, 2 figures, added some comments and new references. To appear in Physics Letters B