We consider central exclusive production of $gg$ dijets in proton-proton (proton-antiproton) collisions at LHC and Tevatron for different intermediate and final gluon polarizations. The amplitude for the process is derived within the $k_{\perp }$-factorization approach (with both the standard QCD and the Lipatov’s effective three-gluon vertices) and is considered in various kinematical asymptotia, in particular, in the important limit of high-$p_{\perp }$ jets. Compared to earlier works we include emissions of gluons from different gluonic $t$-channel lines as well as emission of quark-antiquark dijets. Rapidity distributions, gluon jet $p_{\perp }$ distributions and invariant dijet mass distributions are presented. We explore the competition of the standard diagram with both jets emitted from a single $t$-channel gluon and the one with the emission from both $t$-channel gluons. The second mechanism requires a special treatment. We propose two different approaches. Including special kinematics and using properties of off-diagonal gluons at small $x$ and $\xi$, we arrive to correlations in two-dimensional distributions in rapidity of one and second jet. We find that the second contribution is much smaller than that known from the literature. The digluon production constitutes an important background to exclusive Higgs production.

• Received 4 October 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.84.114014