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 $s**(1/2)=1.96$ TeV using data corresponding
to 9.5 fb${-1}$ 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.
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Updated: Friday, 2013 March 29 10:45:20 CDT automatically from input from Barbara Hehner