This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation; the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; the National Science Council of the Republic of China; the Swiss National Science Foundation; the A. P. Sloan Foundation; the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Germany; the Korean World Class University Program, the National Research Foundation of Korea; the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Royal Society, UK; the Institut National de Physique Nucleaire et Physique des Particules/CNRS; the Russian Foundation for Basic Research; the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and Programa Consolider-Ingenio 2010, Spain; the Slovak R&D Agency; the Academy of Finland; and the Australian Research Council (ARC).

This article reports a measurement of the production cross section of prompt isolated photon pairs in proton-antiproton collisions at √s=1.96 TeV using the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 5.36 fb-1. The cross section is presented as a function of kinematic variables sensitive to the reaction mechanisms. The results are compared with three perturbative QCD calculations: (1) a leading-order parton shower Monte Carlo, (2) a fixed next-to-leading-order calculation and (3) a next-to-leading-order/next-to-next-to-leading-log resummed calculation. The comparisons show that, within their known limitations, all calculations predict the main features of the data, but no calculation adequately describes all aspects of the data.

32 páginas, 21 figuras, 10 tablas.-- PACS numbers: 13.85.Qk.-- CDF Collaboration: et al.

Peer reviewed