Abstract
Currently, the long-standing issue concerning the size of the gluonic content
of the eta' and eta mesons remains unsettled. With this in mind we consider the
central exclusive production (CEP) of eta', eta meson pairs in the perturbative
regime, applying the Durham pQCD-based model of CEP and the `hard exclusive'
formalism to evaluate the meson production subprocess. We calculate for the
first time the relevant parton-level processes gg --> qqbar gg and gg --> gggg,
where the final-state gg and qqbar pairs form a pseudoscalar flavour-singlet
state. We observe that these amplitudes display some non-trivial and
interesting theoretical properties, and we comment on how this can be
understood in a MHV framework. Finally, we present a phenomenological study,
and show that the cross sections for the CEP of eta', eta meson pairs are
strongly sensitive to the size of the gluon content of these mesons. The
observation of these processes could therefore provide important and novel
insight into this problem.
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