Abstract

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 and diphoton states have sufficiently well understood theoretical properties and sufficiently large cross sections that they can serve as ‘standard candle’ processes with which we can benchmark predictions for new physics CEP at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In this talk I give an overview of the basic theoretical formalism used to describe CEP processes and, motivated by the broad agreement with theoretical predictions of recent CEP measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron, discuss and give predictions for heavy quarkonia and diphoton exclusive production at the Tevatron, RHIC and LHC . The results confirm the rich phenomenology that these production processes offer at present and future high-energy colliders.