Exclusive and diffractive $$\gamma \gamma $$ production in PbPb collisions at the LHC, HE-LHC and FCC

In this paper we present a detailed analysis of the contribution of the Light-by-Light (LbL), Durham and double diffractive processes for the diphoton production in ultraperipheral PbPb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), High-Energy LHC (HE-LHC) and Future Circular Collider (FCC). The acceptance of the central and forward LHC detectors is taken into account and predictions for the invariant mass, rapidity, transverse momentum and acoplanarity distributions are presented. Our results indicate that the contribution of the Durham process is negligible and that the double diffractive process can be strongly suppressed by the exclusivity cuts, which will allow to perform a precise analysis of the LbL scattering, as well the search of beyond Standard Model physics in this final state.