Diffractive dijet photoproduction in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC in next-to-leading order QCD

We make predictions for the cross sections of diffractive dijet photoproduction in pp, pA and AA ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) at the LHC during Runs 1 and 2 using next-to-leading perturbative QCD. We find that the resulting cross sections are sufficiently large and, compared to lepton-proton scattering at HERA, have an enhanced sensitivity to small observed momentum fractions in the diffractive exchange, commonly denoted jets, and an unprecedented reach in the invariant mass of the photon-nucleon system W. We examine two competing schemes of diffractive QCD factorization breaking, which assume either a global suppression factor or a suppression for resolved photons only and demonstrate that the two scenarios can be distinguished by the nuclear dependence of the distributions in the observed parton momentum fraction in the photon x(gamma)(jets).