Measurement of the cross section for prompt isolated diphoton production using the full CDF Run II data sample

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This Letter reports a measurement of the cross section for producing pairs of central prompt isolated photons in proton-antiproton collisions at a total energy of 1.96 TeV using data corresponding to 9.5/fb integrated luminosity collected with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron.

• The measured differential cross section is compared to three calculations derived from the theory of strong interactions.
• These include a prediction based on a leading order matrix element calculation merged with parton shower, a next-to-leading order, and a next-to-next-to-leading order calculation.
• The first and last calculations reproduce most aspects of the data, thus showing the importance of higher-order contributions for understanding the theory of strong interaction and improving measurements of the Higgs boson and searches for new phenomena in diphoton final states.