Estimate of the single diffractive heavy quark production in heavy ion collisions at the CERN LHC

The single diffractive cross section for heavy quarks production is calculated at next-to-leading order (for nucleus-nucleus collisions. Such processes are expected to occur at the LHC, where the nuclei involved are lead at ffiffiffis p ¼ 5:5 TeV and calcium at ffiffiffis p ¼ 6:3 TeV. We start using the hard diffractive factorization formalism, taking into account a recent experimental parametrization for the Pomeron structure function (DPDF). Absorptive corrections are accounted for by the multiple Pomeron contributions considering a gap survival probability, where its theoretical uncertainty for nuclear collisions is discussed. We estimate the diffractive ratios for the single diffraction process in nuclear coherent/ incoherent collisions at the LHC